[RedShift1]

> Or, in a sentence: you can improve these projects in the way you see fit if you take the steps required.

Well yes, but actually, no. If upstream denies or ignores your pull requests, you're dead in the water. Just try and make a pull request to bring back a feature that Gnome or GTK dumped a few years prior.

[throwaway82652]

> If upstream denies or ignores your pull requests, you're dead in the water

No, this is very wrong. You can maintain a fork. You can do that while maintaining positive relations with them to see if eventually they do decide to take the PR.

Of course nobody wants to do that because it's a lot of work. So what's really happening here is you're trying to play hot potato with a feature that nobody wants to maintain, not even you. I sympathize, I also have patches sitting around in various projects that went nowhere. There just isn't enough time in the day for unpaid volunteers to look at every patch.

[plaguepilled]

Thanks for commenting: I sort of agree, as this sort of feeds into my point.

The 'meta-argument' I was making is that delivery requires coordination, and the more you deliver the more work it is.

That's all well and good, but on a singular level I agree that simply throwing a patch request without doing the due diligence won't get you far.