Ask HN: Take over abandoned GitHub repo

13 points by brechin 13 years ago | 7 comments

I'm interested in participating more in the open source community, and have found a project that I can work on during business hours with the blessing of my employer. The maintainer hasn't pushed code or responded to any posted issues or pull requests in more than a year. I've tried emailing the current owner, but no response.

The project in question is a pure-Python PDF parsing libarary, pdfminer. https://github.com/euske/pdfminer

What's the best course of action? Rename (e.g. pdfminer2) and try to communicate that to the existing user base? Quietly work on my own branch? Contact GitHub support to try to transfer it?

dropproxy 13 years ago |

Fork it and start merging pull requests from the people that made them to euske

bmelton 13 years ago |

It's MIT-licensed, so just fork it and start working on it. People searching for it by title will likely find it after a while regardless. If you can get watchers/participants and a solid commit history, it may eventually supplant the original as the first search result on Github.

touristtam 13 years ago | |

Try to communicate with other contributors that have pending pull request (see https://github.com/euske/pdfminer/network). You might be able to drive a decision to keep a single repo, maybe under a 'new' organisation.

username111 13 years ago |

If you don't get a response definitely fork and rename.

ig1 13 years ago |

Fork and rename, but don't call it pdfminer2 as that's trampling over the namespace of the original. Rename it to something new.

codegeek 13 years ago |

clickable https://github.com/euske/pdfminer

brechin 13 years ago | |

Thanks!