From: Evan Silberman <evan@jklol.net>
Subject: Re: Adding Message-ID to mail(1)
To: tech@openbsd.org 
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:13:44 -0700

Walter Alejandro Iglesias <wai@roquesor.com> wrote:
> [a bunch of stuff]

From what I have observed there's basically one reliable way to get
one's patches into OpenBSD, as someone making occasional contributions
to scratch an itch, without any previously-earned trust from the
development team:

1. Send a patch (inline!) that makes a single atomic improvement to
something, with some explanation in the email body for why you think
it's better.

2. Wait for someone to take an interest, pinging if necessary not more
than once a week or so.

3. If someone has feedback, revise your patch in response to that
feedback, or else explain why you prefer your approach.

Repeat all of the above until someone lands your patch or you get tired
and do something else. It is true that sometimes it feels frustrating to
work this way, especially in cases like yours where you have a bunch of
work you've already done and you think all of it is good. But it's
really the only way that I've seen most kinds of patches sent to tech@
get reviewed.

It's certainly regrettable that these expectations aren't clearly
communicated; OpenBSD doesn't have a ton of "onboarding process" or
anything of the kind, presumably because it's an old project mostly
maintained by a quite small team of people who mostly know each other
and prefer to operate by convention and consensus than by establishing a
bunch of bureaucracy and community norms. As you were more or less told
some weeks ago, sending a bunch of patches that you want to see all at
once linked in a zip file is far from preferred. You're now trying to
land a single patch, which is an improvement, but you've resent it
several times a day, in two different versions, which is not.

In the process you have evidently annoyed at least two of the developers
with the most interest in email (generally) and thus mail(1)
(specifically), plus probably a bunch of people who have started
filtering you out without mentioning it, by acting entitled to the time,
attention, and deference of people who have more of a stake in the
project than you do.

If you reduce the heavy volume of pings and try to keep the grievance
and entitlement out of your messages, you might get lucky and someone
will still have the patience to work with you on the changes you want to
see. If you don't get lucky, you have the source and a permissive
license and you can enjoy your version of mail(1) in good conscience.

Regards,
Evan