What to do when your patch gets ignored

[Richard]

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
>