[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Steven Rostedt]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 11:24:41 +0530
Sudip Mukherjee <sudipm.mukherjee at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another problem, when a newbie tries to move out of staging to some other
> subsystem he likes, the maintainer may not be that much responsive. Just
> for example, i submitted a patch on November, 2014 and I am yet to receive
> a reply or review to that and the patch was not a style correction patch.

BTW, it should always be OK to ping the maintainer if they ignore a
patch. I believe one week is a good time to wait. And again in another
week if they still do not reply. I know a few maintainers that think if
they get to a patch that is old and the author never pinged them, they
think the author doesn't think that patch is too important and they
just delete it.

I know I've been bad when patches are sent to me, especially if I'm
traveling and I don't have access to a real computer (read the patch on
my phone). I'll mark it with 'todo' and go on. By the time I get home,
I have 10 or 20 emails marked 'todo' and I could spend days on a few of
them before continuing. Finally, they just get buried, and lost in the
abyss of my INBOX. I never delete them, and after my inbox gets too
big, I'll actually try to purge it from oldest to newest, and I have
replied to patches that were over a year old, and even applied them!

I tell everyone, that if they do not hear from me within a week, please
send me a 'ping'. It will put that patch higher in the 'todo' stack.

I'm sure all maintainers are fine with a friendly ping after a week.
Don't send a ping before then, because maintainers are busy, and may
get annoyed by being too pushy.

-- Steve