[Chicago] GitHub & SpamBayes

[Adam "Cezar" Jenkins]

Just as Dan said. Git is great, Github goes even beyond that. I've
submitted few line fixes to projects without ever leaving my browser.

Here is an example of a pull request
https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/3582

That is much easier than joining a mailing list, making a patch, then
sending it off into the air. This will notify me, @ people, annotate lines
of code, etc, etc.

You seem very resigned to not use Github or anything else. No offense, but
the undertone I get from you is you'll find any reason you can not to
change what you're doing now. I hope you aren't just reaching for reasons
not to.

If that is the case, then that's fine, but I suggest that you put some
research into it. In your case, since you're just maintaining and not
developing so much, Github is the bigger benefit than Git.
https://github.com/features/projects


On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Dan Krol <orblivion at gmail.com> wrote:

> Git does help. Github helps more, again specifically because of the
> pull request feature.
>
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 8:14 PM, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 8:12 PM, Adam "Cezar" Jenkins
> > <emperorcezar at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I think you're mistaken on how most people find projects and contribute
> to
> >> them. In my opinion most people find a project because of a need.
> >
> > That I most certainly understand.  Those of us who are/were SpamBayes
> > developers worked on it because it scratched an itch we had.  It's
> > still in use on mail.python.org (whether you realize it or not - it
> > provides a bit of spam filtering for most mailing lists like this one,
> > and serves as the only spam filtering for Usenet news messages
> > gatewayed to python-list at python.org).  We all used to use it.
> > Eventually though, our mail service providers wound up in one of three
> > camps:
> >
> > * Some developed good spam filter technology themselves.  Gmail falls
> > into this category.  I presume other major big name mail providers do
> > as well (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), though I have no direct experience with
> > them.
> >
> > * Others were pressured by the above 800-pound gorillas to not simply
> > forward all the spam along.  Pobox.com, who provides mail forwarding
> > for me, falls into this category.  It was easy to provide leverage.
> > All the big guys had to do was threaten to start refusing mail from
> > those forwarding services if they didn't do what they could at the
> > front-end (while the SMTP connection was still open - blackhole lists,
> > greylisting, etc).
> >
> > * They were driven out of business because they didn't do what groups
> > like pobox.com did.
> >
> > I wound up with effectively no spam reaching my mailbox, so I had
> > nothing for SpamBayes to munch on.  I eventually decided that the
> > combination of Gmail + pobox.com was "good enough".  I suspect most
> > other open source developers fall into the same camp.
> >
> > SpamBayes is now left with a few users who need help and are decidedly
> > not developers.  I doubt that most of the open source developers who
> > could fix the problems SpamBayes has on Windows would need its
> > features either.
> >
> >> If it
> >> doesn't work and they are developers, they will probably want to make it
> >> work. Github makes it much much easier for them to push a button and
> push
> >> those changes back to you.
> >
> > I find it unlikely that a developer for whom SpamBayes scratches no
> > itch is going to fix bugs.
> >
> >> Without something like Github, the barrier to contribute back is higher.
> >
> > But isn't that Git speaking, not necessarily GitHub?  Could I just
> > convert the Subversion repo at SF to Git and get the same benefit?
> >
> >> Your original post talked about the users of your project, so you
> already
> >> have a community. You talk about how they need to use the project, so
> you
> >> already are fullfilling a need. What you don't have is a simple way to
> >> contribute back. You had a user suggest Github as a way to do that.
> >
> > Yes, but the people with the problems are not developers.  The
> > SpamBayes developers no longer need or use the tool.  I'm left with a
> > community of users who can't help themselves (well, except perhaps for
> > this one fellow who didn't say, "move to GitHub and I'll fix your
> > problems", but "move to GitHub and someone else will fix your
> > problems"), and a community of (former) developers who no longer use
> > the tool and have moved on to scratch other itches.
> >
> > It's unclear to me that the investment of my time in moving from
> > Subversion to Git (be it at GitHub, SF, or somewhere else) is going to
> > pay itself back.  It would be different if I was still actively
> > working on SpamBayes myself.  Then I would have no problem moving to
> > Git (or Mercurial, or Bazaar).  With no current developers, it would
> > seem to make little sense to move the code repository on the
> > off-chance that someone will find it and start contributing.
> >
> > Skip
> > _______________________________________________
> > Chicago mailing list
> > Chicago at python.org
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
> _______________________________________________
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>
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