As you may have heard, coding superhero _why the lucky stiff recently deleted all his repos, took down his domains and completely removed his online presence. Nobody knows the reason, and we hope he's doing well.
It's important, however, that his wonderful code live on, and we need your help to do so. We've mirrored what repos we could find and contacted github tech support, who have promised assistance. Whymirror will do what it can to ease the transition but CANNOT be a long-term solution. We need the community (this means YOU) to:
Find maintainers for each project
Once maintainer(s) have been found, github will 'bless' one as the official repository -- the rest of the network will read "fork of blessedrepo/projectname". (If there are multiple maintainers, the project can set up "thisproject" as a user for the "thisproject" repo -- see rails/rails or starling/starling -- with each maintainer having push rights on the shared repo)
The surviving wikis for each project must be moved into github pages within that project. (This is the solution suggested by github's @tekkub) Just:
git remote add -f -m master whymirror git://github.com/whymirror/PROJECTNAME.git) and checkout the pages branch (git checkout -b gh-pages whymirror/gh-pages)Documentation formerly housed on code.whytheluckystiff.net/doc should also be moved to github pages. Our best bet here is probably archive.org.
Issues from the github trackers. (Maybe github can help with that?)
Recover several missing repos -- see the list of repos, below.
Finally, if you'd like to help copilot whymirror please get in touch.
Thank you, thank you for whatever contribution you can provide. And to _why: so long and thanks for all the fish^h^h^h^h chunky bacon.
-- Flip Kromer (@mrflip / http://infochimps.org) and Seth Thomas Rasmussen (@greatseth / http://greatseth.com) for the http://github.com/whymirror project
bloopsaphone: Sonic rangers mental and aberant will maintain this project. Check out the raucous susurration of commits on bloopsaphone from mental this week!
blimlimb: Hero of the realm with honorary oak leaf bterlson will maintain this project, *and* is migrating the documentation.
bumpspark: almighty bruce will maintain this project. Says Bruce, "This version is a modification of _why's (specifically it's not BMP, it's PNG, and it generates transparent images) from the various collaborators on the original post and some work of mine; I'll put this together as a separate repo, build out a gemspec, and add some tests."
camping: This code will live at camping/camping, and expert scoutmaster judofyr heads a community effort to keep camping.
He writes:“For Camping, we've created camping/camping which will be the “offical” repo. Also, I'm not going to be a 100% maintainer for Camping, but the community (mostly the people on the mailing list) will take care of it. See http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/camping-list/2009-August/001049.html ”
8cpj: Hollywood Upstairs Medical College alumn Dr Nic is going to keep on keeping 8cpj on.
hacketyhack: Intrepid codesmith steveklabnik will maintain hacketyhack. AWESOME.
The why-archive project has a recent version of hacktyhack, and needs to be reconciled with the http://github.com/whymirror/hacketyhack repo.
hobix: This code will live at hobix/hobix, and man of mystery mental maintains this project. Man of mojo crnixon has volunteered to help: "I can get the online installer and site back up and running this week ... [and] continue to improve it in the spirit of _why." Awesomesauce.
hoodwinkd: garrulous grifter robbyrussell will maintain this code.
hpricot: elite greengrocers ecarnevale, olabini and crazycode will make sure this vital project stays fresh. Interested parties should contact ecarnevale regarding documentation additions to the wiki and other concerns -- i5m is to be thanked for his work on the thankless task of "fixing the hpricot wiki".
markaby: With great enthusiasm joho, smtlaissezfaire and spox have volunteered to maintain this project. They'll let us know what the final team is. Spox writes, "It's a great library and I am starting to work on speed enhancements for it. I do not see any wiki materials that need to be transferred but I will be happy to start building one up as well as getting the issue tracker going for bug reporting."
metaid: was recovered from http://rubyforge.org/projects/metaid by champions of the world dannytatom, evaryont and chneukirchen! Dannytatom is the head maintainer, and recovered the documentation to boot.
mousehole: Cool cat evaryont maintains this project. He's also recovered the documentation.
parkplace: Defender of the crown mattjamieson is the maintainer of this project, encouraged by the legendary technoweenie. mattjamieson is also going to migrate the documentation from archive into the github pages. YAY
potion: Master alchemist fogus is going to maintain this project, with assistance from breadmaster toastyapps. As wmorgan writes, "Potion is why's greatest work" -- check it out.
redcloth: for some time, jgarber has been head of the Redcloth team (I accidentally included it on the mailings, sorry jason and all). JGailor and jbarnette will help transition documentation.
yup has an old version of superredcloth captured from the code.whytheluckystiff.net SVN, if the redcloth project would like to adopt it. faithfulgeek has recovered the textile documentation from hobix.com and will recreate then github pages in redcloth if needed.
sheila: is now part of the ditz project, but wmorgan will be the maintainer such as maintainer need be.
sandbox (alt) and Try Ruby: Jedi masters parolkar and Sophrinix are recovering Try Ruby and its sandbox-shaped heart. Thanks to lsegal who recovered a bunch of sandbox code from svn. Once it's done, they'll post to comp.lang.ruby to get it linked from ruby-lang.org again. Try Ruby is a great project, please do what you can to help parolkar revive it!
shoes: This code will live at shoes/shoes, where farrier to the stars mental will help maintain shoes with greatseth. The code will live at shoes
A new mailing list and forums are up at http://groups.google.com/group/shoooes
Join us in #shoes on freenode!
The perspicacious fogus has preserved chirrup, skistrap, fakeplus, processor, rb_parse_args.
Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby: There are several repos, at poignant-guide, poignantguide, why-archive (broad archive) and poignant-br (brazilian translation). Please help reconcile them and identify the newest version, which is probably mislav's poignant-guide. They've also recovered the soundtrack and re-hosted on S3!
Nobody Knows Shoes: andhapp is going to work to restore this documentation.
yown: Maintainer needed.
These repos are being restored from SVN: chirrup, skistrap, fakeplus, processor, rb_parse_args, greg, bumpspark, myfs, railsfs, superredcloth, wordy. Once those are back up, smtlaissezfaire will answer requests for myfs and railsfs. The rest need maintainers, but due to their age and simplicity this should be a very easy task.
http://rubyforge.org/projects/dns-zone/: If you have pulls (of any vintage) for this project, please create a github repo and message whymirror, who will fork your version.