I have some recent experience in this matter and I have some tips:
- try very hard to contact the maintainers, original creators, and anybody else who's ever uploaded a copy. Learn from PAUSE which user ids have admin and which have write perms and contact all those people.
- post somewhere about your intentions to take over the module, somewhere high profile, like this site. You'll get frontpaged, and you'll maybe attract some attentions of people in the know.
- After the above, go ahead and post to the list that you wish to take over. It'll take a month, so...
- Be really polite, respectful, and persistent. Check in every week. It's slow, but it works out in the end.
Woah, I missed the part where you don't have time to maintain it, before I started blabbing on and on. That's the biggest problem with any module with lots of tickets and patches. Choose to be the guy that makes the time to apply patches and upload, it's worth it. It's just a couple hours here and there and you'll save someone some headaches.
If not, much of the above still applies, I'm sure.
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A related issue is that the Subversion/Perl Swig bindings are really painful to build. Getting them from an OS/distribution package is great if you are using the corresponding perl and subversion packages. If you have a different perl and/or subversion build then you're on your own.
I made a stab ages ago at building a simple direct Perl/XS binding to the SVN libs but never got enough time and finally got the SVN bindings building properly in our build system.
This dependency seems to me the biggest barrier to user and developer adoption to SVN::Web. I ended up deciding that using Trac or Warehouse (from the Lighthouse app people) was an easier route, especially since my desire to tweak was low. Of course if you want to tweak in Perl then those solutions won't help.
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