[Chicago] GitHub & SpamBayes

[Skip Montanaro]

> I think I see Skips problem.  He thinks (and may be correct, he sure
> knows more about it than any of us do) that no one is going to
> contribute regardless of how easy it is.
...
> What he really needs is for someone else to become an active
> maintainer, and they can move it to github.
>
> Skip, how close am I?

Close.  I look at it this way.  Moving will require some work to
migrate from SF/svn to SF/git or GitHub/git, with no obvious payoff.
It's not like someone has told me, "I would be happy to fix your
Windows installer problems if SpamBayes was hosted on GitHub. It would
be so much easier for me to contribute."  My assumption at this point
is that I need to do the work up front (probably not much, but
non-zero).  Then I will have to make people aware of the project and
its needs.  (More work.) Someone else mentioned that GitHub's issue
tracker more-or-less sucks, so maybe I need to set up a tracker at
code.google.com.  (A bit more work.)  Still, there is no guarantee
anybody will come along and even see my tracker issues, much less work
on them.  Then, should any of the existing (dormant) developers want
to track progress, they will have to set up clones, maybe learn Git
from scratch, etc.

Let's assume I have no developers banging down my door to help, and I
do all the work above.  How do I make people aware of the project and
its needs within the GitHub universe?  That's what I see as the most
challenging part, unless GitHub has a button I can press which reads:
"Send a note to all GitHub folks with Windows installer and Python
experience pleading for help."

Then, let's assume I have everything set up and am ready to process
pull requests.  I no longer even use SpamBayes, so my own ability to
test other peoples' changes will be a bit compromised.

I'm really not trying to be dense or difficult here.  I am hesitant to
put any effort into this without at least seeing that there might be a
path from A to B.

Skip