What to do when your patch gets ignored
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 -- The contents of this email are confidential. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer. Thank you. Devo, Inc; arco@devo.com <mailto:arco@devo.com>; 255 Main St Suite 702, Cambridge MA USA 02142 Calle Estébanez Calderón 3-5, 5th Floor Madrid, Spain 28020
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
Hi Richard, Thank you very much for your reply, I really appreciate it. On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 2:18 PM Richard <richard_siegfried@systemli.org> wrote:
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 :)
Sure thing! I just didn't want my first message to be marked as spam because of links. I will add a link to each of the mail in the list I provided in my previous email.
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.
Wait, I think there's a small misunderstanding here: I contributed to the bcache module that it's in the mainline kernel, not to the bcachefs project. But, apart from this, yes this is something that crossed my mind: maybe the maintainer is just accepting small bug fixes (and he's actually reviewing and merging them when they arrive, he's just ignoring my emails). At this point, I really hope to have made some _huge_ mistake and that someone can help me point it out and fix it, so I can maybe stop speculating on why I'm not getting any answer. Thank you, Andrea
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. https://marc.info/?l=linux-bcache&m=164675141727884&w=3
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. https://marc.info/?l=linux-bcache&m=164682477802826&w=3
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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-- The contents of this email are confidential. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer. Thank you. Devo, Inc; arco@devo.com <mailto:arco@devo.com>; 255 Main St Suite 702, Cambridge MA USA 02142 Calle Estébanez Calderón 3-5, 5th Floor Madrid, Spain 28020
On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 02:52:22PM +0200, Andrea Tomassetti wrote:
The contents of this email are confidential. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer. Thank you. Devo, Inc; arco@devo.com <mailto:arco@devo.com>;
Now deleted. Note, this footer requires kernel developers to delete any email sent with it as it is not compatible with the kernel license at all. greg k-h
On Fri, 10 Jun 2022 16:34:03 +0200, Greg KH said:
Now deleted.
Note, this footer requires kernel developers to delete any email sent with it as it is not compatible with the kernel license at all.
I had a standard form letter for that sort of nonsense, which asked if they wanted us to just hit delete, which would almost certainly leave lots of copies recoverable off all the systems involved, by any competent computer security expert, or if they were willing to indemnify us for the expenses involved in checking our (rather large) e-mail cluster, track down any copies on disk (including unlinked but not over-written blocks) and guarantee a forensically secure overwrite, and regenerate backup tapes that didn't include the blocks that the e-mail landed on in various passes through the queues. Oh, and the knock-on cost of downtime, as several thousand people would be idled while the email systems were down. (We actually once collected some $300K from a contractor who negligently set off the Halon, for everybody who couldn't get work done in the 3 hours it took to get everything back up.)now Other gotcha #1: We were trying to buy some fairly small equipment under rules that basically said we could accept the first reasonable offer rather than a full competitive bid. One company missed out because they sent *me* the offer - and I had to send them a reply that said "Nice offer. Too bad I had to delete it rather than forwarding it to my boss who has approval authority". Guess what happened while they got their act together and re-sent it? Yup - somebody else got an offer in first.... Other gotcha #2: Some legal experts say that blindly tagging *everything* with this footer rather than doing the right thing and using PGP or other crypto for stuff that actualy *is* sensitive, is basically an admission that they don't actually have a *clue* what data is or isn't sensitive. This can come back and bite them big time if there's an actual breach and there's now evidence of incompetence....
From: Andrea Tomassetti <andrea.tomassetti-opensource@devo.com> Hi all, thank you very much to have pointed out the footer problem. It took sometime to my IT dpt to figure out a solution, but now we have it. I will send the patch again, as a brand new one. I hope to receive some replies. Kind regards, Andrea
On Mon, 04 Jul 2022 16:57:23 +0200, Andrea Tomassetti said:
From: Andrea Tomassetti <andrea.tomassetti-opensource@devo.com>
Hi all, thank you very much to have pointed out the footer problem.
It took sometime to my IT dpt to figure out a solution, but now we have it.
Hopefully, their solution was "Don't blindly attach the footer to every outgoing mail, sensitive or not, and don't use unencrypted e-mail for actually sensitive data" :)
participants (5)
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Andrea Tomassetti -
Andrea Tomassetti -
Greg KH -
Richard -
Valdis Klētnieks