Suggestions how to improve "contributor" experience....

[maxmeyer]

Dear maintainers of thor,

I'm a heavy user of thor as commandline parser and a "part-time" contributor. I really like to use thor, I'm grateful that you @wycats make it avaiblable to the public.

Unfortunately there's little activity in this repository although there seems to be some room of improvement if I look at your issue/PR tracker. Myself added a PR over a month ago without any feedback.

I see, that you all have private lives, have a job and/or are dedicated to some other projects - as already discussed in #469. I also understand, that care needs to be taken to review the patches.

But I hope you also can understand the contributors view. We also have more or less the same problems like you. Maybe we're also maintainers of some other project(s). But we took some of our spare time and put together a PR and contribute it to the thor project. Not getting any feedback is quite frustrating.

From my perspective, it's maybe a thing of priorities: It looks like you @sferik are quite involved in the rubygems-project which is a much more important project than thor. But it also looks like that all other maintainers are also more involved with other projects/communities. So there's no one left for thor?

Suggestions

1. No, I don't want to fork the project!!! 😄
2. Maybe you could involve some guys you trust, which have a little bit more time than you can spend on this project
3. Maybe you could move thor to the rails-organization. Maybe there are some guys you trust to move the project in right direction
4. Add a "maintenance"-mode warning, to prevent users to add PRs for new features - though this is not an option I prefer personally

Last but least, I'm really grateful about your work, but I don't want to see thor dying slowly. It's too important and I like it too much for that.

[doudou]

No comments on that one either from @wycats @sferik. A lot of the recent PRs actually follow the contributing document to the letter ...

Thor is such a useful project .... maybe it is really time to try and let in some of the people that are obviously wanting to help ? (https://github.com/erikhuda/thor/pulls)

[odigity]

👍

[wycats]

@maxmeyer @doudou Sorry for letting this issue languish as long as it has.

I'm very interested in giving some interested people more control over the project.

@maxmeyer if you're still interested, can you email me?

[maxmeyer]

@wycats I'm quite interested in helping out with thor, but not as maintainer, but as contributor. Being now one of the maintainers of aruba I learned that it takes quite a bit of my time to do things right. Unfortuantely I'm too busy (at the moment) to finish the stuff I want for aruba 1.0. I think it would be unfair from myside to "promise" to be a (good) maintainer.

[maxmeyer]

I think I can help with documentation and some testing. Most times I'm digging through thor's api not finding the relevant pieces of documentation at once. I'm now moving even aruba's documentation to the way rspec and cucumber do their documentation - http://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/docs. @wycats If you like that style of documentation I can prepare feature files for that. But I think, not before December 2015.

[odigity]

I just started learning Thor yesterday, and I've already discovered that the docs on whatisthor.com don't match the Wiki home page:

(http://whatisthor.com/)

class MyCLI < Thor
  option :from
...

(https://github.com/erikhuda/thor/wiki)

class MyCLI < Thor
  method_option :from

To satisfy my curiosity, I tried both versions in my helloworld (both worked), then tried finding both in the current RDoc (only found method_option). (http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/thor/Thor)

So... I assume option is the old way, and method_option is the new way. But it sure would have been nice to save 20m and not have the confusion in the first place. :)

BTW-I'm really exciting about using Thor to build a great command to replace all my shell scripts and rake tasks. I do hope it has a bright future.

[odigity]

Another example...

Currently reading through the source to get the full story, came across this:

https://github.com/erikhuda/thor/blob/master/lib/thor.rb#L78

# Maps an input to a command. If you define:
#
#   map "-T" => "list"
#
# Running:
#
#   thor -T
#
# Will invoke the list command.
#
# ==== Parameters
# Hash[String|Array => Symbol]:: Maps the string or the strings in the array to the given command.
#

The example shows the command name as string, but the RDoc syntax description asks for a Symbol -- and the value is not normalized within the map() method body. (I imagine it is further down the line.)

UPDATE: Would also be nice to pick one of 'command', 'task', and 'method' and standardize on it throughout the code and docs.

[doudou]

@odigity please do not hijack a PR / issue thread like this. Wanting to update the documentation is great, but please create a dedicated issue thread for what you find (or, even better, a PR)

[rafaelfranca]

Thor was moved to the Rails organization and all the Rails core team has access to review and accept contributions.