Er... what? What's hard about contributing? You don't have to go through a web interface for everything? IMHO that makes it easier.
$ git clone git://c9x.me/ed.git
<do your changes>
$ git format-patch --cover-letter <any other options you want> <commits>
<edit the file if you want>
$ git send-email <the file>
`man git send-email` will tell you anything you need to know: configuration options, examples... If is well-written and straightforward!
Seems like the author isn't interested in public issue tracking (yet), and using Github wouldn't have changed that.I, for one, celebrate that he's not using Github. I'm very afraid of the git == github trend I'm seeing amongst many people (technically semi-literate or even technical people)
I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.
Are your issues simple text files describing it? In a "issues" folder? Do you enforce a format? How do you track their status?
You can pipe it through awk to remove any lines starting with a space/tab, sort it then then diff the result with earlier versions to work out progress etc as well.
For multiple contributors, I don't think this will scale well, atleast without using some tool on top of the VCS.
First off, your assumption that people use the command line to interact with git is no longer correct. While that was true when I started using git, that's no longer a requirement for basic usage.
Next, perhaps as a corallary, many computer users don't have local email working, ie 'mail user@example.com' on the command line doesn't work. This means that git send-email also won't work.
Sad to say, but getting git send-email working is (unfortunately) beyond some people (as is getting a working 'tar' command line sans Google, apparently).
There's also `git imap-send` if you want to have it dump the email into the Drafts folder on an IMAP server, where you can review it and send it from your normal mail client.
And, seriously, e-mailing patches is tedious, error-prone and ultimately inefficient. _anything_ that smooths the path for contributors is paramount for a successful project, and I, for one, would love this becoming more than a one-off, niche thing.
(I'd also like to have Alt-Enter instead of Tab on it, and a Mac port, and even though the first is trivial enough to do, the second requires a fair amount of time to implement)