[Chicago] GitHub & SpamBayes

[Adam "Cezar" Jenkins]

Will it solve all your problems? No. Will you get pull requests? Yes.

Github makes it orders of magnitude easier to contribute to a project. IF
someone is there to actually go through and merge in the pull requests.

I became a maintainer of Django-recurrence because it was on launchpad and
I just pulled down the code and put it on Github. All the sudden I was
getting pull requests and interest in the project.

People can litteraly edit code using the web interface and create a pull
request. If I have to svn down your code from Sourceforge, create a patch,
then email someone, it's not going to happen. It's not a few button pushes
away.


On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

> Based on the thread asking for people's GitHub info, there seem to be some
> GitHub experts here.  Indulge me for a moment to ask a question about
> GitHub and what it can "do for me." (In my defense, SpamBayes is a
> Python-based project.)
>
> I'm one of the SpamBayes developers (http://www.spambayes.org/), but we
> have all moved onto other things.  Consequently, it's been pretty dormant
> for at least three or four years.  The bulk of the infrequent questions
> sent to the spambayes at python.org mailing list these days relate to the
> Outlook plugin which Mark Hammond, Tim Peters and Tony Meyer developed.  (I
> think it's telling that Outlook users still have no better spam filtering
> solution than a long dormant open source tool, but that's a conversation
> for another day.)  As you probably know, Windows hasn't stood still over
> the past few years.  We've had Windows 7, Windows 8, 64-bit versions of
> Outlook, and who knows what all else.  Consequently, it can be challenging
> for your typical Windows user to get SpamBayes installed and functioning,
> if, in fact, they even can.  More commonly, people upgrade their OS or
> Outlook versions and find SpamBayes stops working.
>
> During a recent thread about SpamBayes' (lack of) Windows support, one
> correspondent wrote:
>
> *This is where you officially move the project(s) to GitHub and pay
> attention to pull requests.  You're more likely to get people contributing
> on GitHub than SourceForge.  Forking, modifying, and submitting pull
> requests is just as easy as merging and accepting the pull request into the
> main branch.  If you don't want to do any development (the hard part
> anyway), the key is to stay on top of pull requests and don't let them sit
> around in the queue for more than a couple weeks.  The work on your end
> becomes rather minimal - taking more of a hands-off managerial role.*
>
> It seemed to me that the author was suggesting that if I would just move
> the project to GitHub, all my cares will disappear.  Elves with Windows
> experience will sneak into my workshop at night and solve all my problems,
> leaving pull requests for me to respond to in the morning.  As you might
> expect, I'm just a little skeptical.
>
>
> What do the assembled GitHub experts think?  Will Windows elves magically
> appear to fix Windows support if I simply move SpamBayes from SourceForge
> to GitHub?  Where will these pull requests come from?  Do I need to come up
> with a clever Super Bowl commercial to attract developers?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Skip
>
>
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