[carussell]

> If the author of the repo can't be bothered to look at the issue or a PR then I don't see how they'll be receptive to emails.

There's an assumption here that GitHub is automatically more convenient and desirable than an email or other project management tools. That's not a universal sentiment; not everyone wants to participate in the GitHub social network, and even tools themselves that GitHub offers are a step down depending on who you ask (like the pull request mechanism and issues and what they try to pass off as a "wiki" and...)

So just because a project and its maintainers don't have a big showing on GitHub, don't assume that means anything about the health of the project. It may just mean they have better places and ways to spend their time and get things done.

> Most projects don't have other ways of contacting the people involved

Why do you think the email field that shows up in git's log was put in place? Honest question.

[roblabla]

Why do you assume everyone fills it up ? Honest question.

While it's true github isn't the "best tool" for everything in the world (what is?), I find it mostly serves as a discovery tool. If I have a bug in a project, I'll first look at the issues/PRs for other people who might have fixed the damned thing. And it often turns out there are. The original author might have abandonned the project, or he might have a different way to handle contributions, but that doesn't matter to ME. I care about having my fix, upstreamed or not.

[sigstoat]

> Why do you think the email field that shows up in git's log was put in place? Honest question.

to provide a unique identifier for the author of the commit, and a means for finding the public key you should use to check the signature.