Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

You've worked hard to develop a new feature, fix a tricky problem, or clean up an unloved part of the kernel. You have posted the patches on the relevant mailing lists and yet can't manage to get them merged. You can't get them past the maintainers, and maybe not even manage to attract their interest. What is happening?

Getting patches into the mainline Linux tree can be a tricky thing, especially for newcomers. The kernel does carry a long description of the process of writing and submitting the patches, but doesn't actually describe the complex set of interactions that take place between the submitter and the maintainer, and how trust gets build between the two.

This talks proposes to detail these interactions, and to offer the point of view of a contributor that grew into a maintainer, giving a number of examples of what not to do, and what you could try doing
instead.