Hello,
This one is rather far away from low-level implementation details and more focused on Open Source Philosophy.
[In the following, the patch, which is refered to, is an anonymous patch of an anonymous project. So, this is a philosophical question and not a practical one. As you may guess, any resemblance to existing patch or project is purely coincidental.]
Following some recent commits, a patch is no more valid. When I say no more valid, I mean "throw it to the bin and take 1 hour to write it yourself". The point is that between the moment of its listing and today, it was OK. It was "potentially" adding something useful to the code-base and preparing a more "aggressive" patch.
This patch was not "approved" due to technical disagreements on some specificities. A priori, it is hard to know what is the best solution. A fortiori, one chooses one of the proposed solution and one learns it the hard way. A posteriori, you congratulate yourself for having taking the right path or you congratulate yourself for having learned a lot by choosing the wrong one.
In other words, technical judgment is hard, or I assume so.
Now, to fix this patch there are two approaches:
- wait and see: expect a committer to do a diff3(!?); or
- fix your patch. This one is not so simple: If you decide to fix your patch which was not agreeable, you potentially lose your time. If you decide to fix it and supplement it with other more aggressive features in order to show that you have a clear insight of what you are doing, you potentially lose even more time than in the previous scenario - however, you have learned a lot :).
I hope that you understand the issue of such a scenario.
I am just right now reading "Open Source Development with CVS" (nice reading) to fully understand the overall philosophy. However, I would like to mix this reading with some contributions to G. So any advise is welcome.
Cheers, Gianny
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