When he says approaches similar to 'other packaging systems', which ones is he referring to? I can see why this is a bad approach but am unfamiliar with what would be considered a better practice (outside of just hosting a .tar on CloudFront).
Probably homebrew, which is also heavily based on github, although not to the same extent as CocoaPods apparently is. It's mentioned further downthread.
The main difference is that homebrew actually updates the git tree to provide updated versions of package specs. CocoaPods adds a new directory and some files for each package version, causing the repo to balloon.
RubyGems.org has their own web server and web services for publishing library versions and to allow the clients to fetch libraries and query the universal registry.
Small note: Cargo _does_ use an index (not the source code), in git, on GitHub. However, we're already doing the directory layout that they recommend in-thread, so we shouldn't have this specific problem.
