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Contributing To a Project With a Reclusive Maintainer?
zerointeger writes "I am still fairly new to programming in C, but I was asked to extend an open source authentication module by my employer. The project is complete, testing has been done and it works as designed. The extension/patch I have created is fairly robust, as it includes configuration options, help files, and several additional files. The problem is that I have been unable to make contact with the current maintainer about having this feature added. I think the only reason I'd like to see this included is to prevent any patching of later revisions. A few others I have spoken with agree that the patch would benefit administrators attempting to push Linux onto the desktop, as we have done at the University that employs me. Has anyone else submitted patches/extensions to what seems to be a black hole?"
Either the official maintainer has lost interest, in which case you can simply fork the project, or
I am still fairly new to programming in C (...)
...University that employs me...
He looked at your code, and decided that some noob at a university wasn't worth flaming. This is a fairly common attitude among open source projects. You'll quickly develop a very thick skin.
Welcome to the OSS world, where maintainers disappear off the face of the earth, "unfun" parts never get updated, and projects die out to leave only stale Sourceforge pages dating back years.
Is the maintainer replying to other mails on the list and just ignoring this patch? Presumably he already sent the patch to the list, or there would be no way of getting it accepted (an email with attachments from someone who is not an existing correspondent is likely to be blocked as spam). Are other people on the list interested? Do any of them have commit access?
If other committers like it, then get one of them to commit it; the maintainer, if he wakes up, can always revert it. If no one else has commit access, are other people active contributors? How do they get their patches accepted? If the maintainer isn't replying to them either, then maybe he can persuade some of them to maintain a fork and accept his patch.
If the maintainer is awake and alive but just doesn't like his patch, then his best bet is to make a simpler version that exposes some public interfaces that allow extensions like his to work and to publish his code as an unsupported plugin.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While forking is an option it can be a lot of work for little reward if noone picks up on your fork.
I'd say the first thing to do is try to figure out the following (some of theese will probablly overlap in thier answers)
1: Why is the maintainer not responding? is it because they dont like your patches, because they are overworked or simply because they are no longer involved in the project at all
2: are other users of the project experiancing similar problems.
3: is the project included with major linux distros (debian, fedora, suse etc) and if so what are they doing.
4: when was the last upstream release and does it look like there will ever be another one.
If you do fork you don't want to do it alone, if at all possible you want to get the distros and as much of the userbase on side as you can first.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Another reason why the maintainer might not be responding: It's August, and people are on vacation and otherwise doing family-related stuff. Most open-source projects are done as a hobby, and in general August is a terrible time to submit patches to these kinds of projects. Wait until September and try again.