First, its important to decide if the project is active or not.
Commits to its version control system is good indicator of that. No commits for several months means its quite dead. Then forking/trying to take over the project(SF supports a procedure like that IIRC, I dont know about others) is only option. Taking over usually means getting contact with the original maintainer and that may fail, leaving only forking.
If the project is active there simply might not be enough developers to review the patch or adjust it if the review demands it. Or your patch may have issues that make reviewing it complicated. Often patches are submitted against a version long behind the development version and don't really apply any more.
For an active project there usually is one place where developers converge, often IRC or mail list. Finding that place and posting your patches along with willingness to improve it(sometimes its as simple as patch format) to meet the maintainers demands usually results in an easy merge.
Sometimes however, the extension/feature is not desired by maintainers and you will be told so and you would have to fork.
The best way to do such things is to contact the maintainer when you start developing your extension. It pretty much guarantees a merge at the end.
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First, its important to decide if the project is active or not.
Commits to its version control system is good indicator of that. No commits for several months means its quite dead. Then forking/trying to take over the project(SF supports a procedure like that IIRC, I dont know about others) is only option. Taking over usually means getting contact with the original maintainer and that may fail, leaving only forking.
If the project is active there simply might not be enough developers to review the patch or adjust it if the review demands it. Or your patch may have issues that make reviewing it complicated. Often patches are submitted against a version long behind the development version and don't really apply any more.
For an active project there usually is one place where developers converge, often IRC or mail list. Finding that place and posting your patches along with willingness to improve it(sometimes its as simple as patch format) to meet the maintainers demands usually results in an easy merge.
Sometimes however, the extension/feature is not desired by maintainers and you will be told so and you would have to fork.
The best way to do such things is to contact the maintainer when you start developing your extension. It pretty much guarantees a merge at the end.