So I have been playing with a Ruby gem for a work project that manipulates and extracts data from PDF documents. I wanted to change a method to parallel another, since the functionality was limited. I am not a Ruby expert by any stretch, just started learning two weeks ago, but this is boilerplate. I checked the the RubyForge page, and tried searching GitHub for the project, to find basically nothing. So the question is, where do I go with a potential patch, since the RF page has a patch and a bug I looked at, and activity seems to have stopped a few years ago. Do I just fork and start using GitHub like I planned to? Do I contact RubyForge somehow and ask for assistance (I do not think I have the skills yet to own the project), or do I follow up with RubyGems.org? A little research on StackOverflow and other places makes it unclear how I should proceed, and I am an obvious amateur.
+1
A:
This is just an opinion, but if the project is not active anymore, and the license allows for forking, I would go ahead with it. As long as you mention the original source, I wouldn't see any problems with starting your own. What do other people think?
Josmas
2010-10-30 11:50:48
@Josmas Thanks for the encouraging words. My bigger issue is that I see a proper fork as a responsibility, one that is pretty silly considering I will change only five lines of code and have insufficient scripting knowledge to troubleshoot other bugs (several are open, specifcally one that prevents the toolkit being used on any newish Ruby release on Windows Vista/7). Does this mean I should gear for GitHub?
alharaka
2010-10-30 17:44:42
@vurte Could you tell me how to do this without the necessary privs? I assume I cannot just push to git anonymously, or a vanilla user who started yesterday? I know I can add [a SSH public key to authenticate via gitosis, in theory of course](http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/5/460/faq.html#publickey) but do I not need permission from project maintainer[s]?
alharaka
2010-10-31 11:05:46
Sorry I meant, that you could show us your code part here in stackoverflow. Maybe there is some one who can help your directly with the issue.
vurte
2010-10-31 13:20:47
I do not have trouble; I just want to change it. [PDF-Toolkit](http://pdf-toolkit.rubyforge.org/) is a simple wrapper around a bunch of executables, pdftk, pdftotext (which I am interested in), I need for PDF manipulation. If you check out the docs @ the link, you will see there is a function, [`pdftk()`](http://pdf-toolkit.rubyforge.org/classes/PDF/Toolkit.html#M000002) that allows you to pass arguments to the executable, while [`pdftotext()`](http://pdf-toolkit.rubyforge.org/classes/PDF/Toolkit.html#M000003) does not. I changed the latter to mirror the former, since I need to pass an arg.
alharaka
2010-10-31 17:48:33
And before you ask, the [`to_text()`](http://pdf-toolkit.rubyforge.org/classes/PDF/Toolkit.html#M000003) is equally insufficient for me, and no other function does what I want except `pdftk()`, but for the wrong executable. I would like to update it because I feel `pdftotext()` and `to_text()` are redundant, and that the former should, by naming convention, be more like the `pdftk()` function. Does that make sense?
alharaka
2010-10-31 17:51:55