How/when to send patches - (was Re: [PATCH] one of $BIGNUM devfs races)

[Neil Brown]

On Tuesday August 7, [e-mail] wrote:
> > OK, fair enough. When is your next merge with Linus scheduled? I'd
> > prefer to get a few races fixed before shipping a patch, but I can try
> > to plan for an earlier release if necessary.
> 
> I send stuff Linus regularly and sometimes it goes in and sometimes it
> doesn't. Stuff with active maintainers I don't send on to Linus unless asked
> too - hence joystick. input and much of USB are so far behind in Linus tree

This is something I would like to understand better.

Sometimes I send patches to Linus, and a new prepatch comes out within
hours that contains them.
Sometimes I send patches to Linus and it's like sending them to
/dev/null. Sometimes I resend.  Sometimes it helps.

So I wonder "is he busy? does he have other priorities? does he have a
broken mail system?  is he being rude" in decreasing order of
likelyhood from "very" to "very un-".

So I thought I would try sending to Alan and Linus.  Then they
appeared in an -ac patch, but not in a pre patch.

I thought that might be close enough, but if Alan doesn't plan to
forward them the Linus, then it isn't.

Now I am happy to just resent the pending patches every time a pre
patch comes out that doesn't contain then, but I want to be sure that
isn't going to negatively impact Linus at all.

Comments?

NeilBrown

(I'm talking about patches to fs/nfsd and drivers/md)