Re: What to do when your patch gets ignored

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Hi Andrea,

Could you include a link to some mailing list archive so people her can look at the patch/code without having to google the right version? That makes answering a bit easier and people are lazy :)

For now I can only speculate and from reading your mail two possible reasons come to my mind.

1. Your patch seems pretty big (in its effect/implications) and kernel maintainers are usually conservative, caring a lot more for stability and reliability than the typical github project. So changing something big as your first contribution when you have no reputation makes it more difficult and less likely to get applied/merged. Maybe chose something smaller, my first commits were understand parts of the tcp code in the kernel and writing doc for them

2. As you said the bcache mailing list is pretty inactive. Maybe the project is (semi-) dead? which might mean the maintainer(s) might have very little time/motivation to continue it, which would include reviewing and working with patches. I might be wrong here I don't know the current status of bcachefs but maybe your "error" here was chosing bchachefs to contribute and not something in the mainline kernel.

Hope this helps. I might or might not write something more concrete on the code if you include a link in your answer

-- Richard


On 09/06/2022 15:39, Andrea Tomassetti wrote:
I'm writing here as a last resort in the hope that someone can,
kindly, help me understand what I'm doing wrong and why I'm being
ignored. Let's start from the beginning:

On March 8th, I sent my very first patch "[PATCH] bcache: Use bcache
without formatting existing device" to the linux-bcache mailing list.
I was very excited to finally contribute to the Linux kernel. After
just one day I received very positive feedback (unfortunately not from
the maintainer) and I followed up the same day; fulfilling the
requests.

On March 10th, I submitted the third version of my patch with fixes of
some warnings reported by the "kernel test robot". No replies from any
of the maintainers.

On March 22nd, I sent a kind ping: I got no replies from any of the maintainers.

On March 28th, I sent the 4th version of the patch.

On April 21st, I sent a kind ping replying to my last patch message,
asking for *any* feedback: I still haven't received any reply.

I fully understand that it's almost certainly my fault. Should I have
sent a RFC instead of sending a PATCH? I really don't know and the
worst part is that I will never know unless someone responds to me.
I'm willing to learn and ready to take accountability for my mistakes
but being ignored prevents me from doing so.

The linux-bcache mailing list has zero-to-little activity, so I don't
think that my multiple emails got lost and on the other hand it's very
difficult to help the maintainer with other patch requests, because
there are so few of them (I read this could be a way to encourage the
maintainer to respond to your other requests).

Should I just give up?
Should I resend my PATCH as RFC and hope for the best?

I'm open to suggestions.

Thank you very much in advance,
Andrea


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