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

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On 07/16/2015 06:25 AM, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 09:20:43PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>> Sudip Mukherjee <sudipm.mukherjee@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.
>
> Please don't encourage people to send content free pings bit instead
> resend it - a content free ping mostly just adds to mail volume which is
> pretty much the original problem.  If the patch has actually been lost
> then a resend is going to be needed anyway and if not then it's mostly
> just adding to mail volume.  With a lot of mail clients (including mutt
> which I use) the nag will get threaded in with the original patch buried
> back in the mailbox and not even be seen if that's still sitting waiting
> for handling.
>

I tried both (ping and resend). In either case the response depends on the
maintainer. Some will accept either, some will say you should have res-sent
the patch if you sent a ping, some will tell you that you should have
pinged if you re-sent it. Depending on the maintainer the response can be
pretty strong.

It would be great to have a single well defined and documented mechanism
to avoid the "whatever you do is wrong" response.

Guenter