[ScottBurson]

I once got really pissed off when I submitted a patch to a project and got no response at all. I waited several days, but when I saw that the maintainers were responding to new threads on the mailing list -- not just to existing threads -- I got upset and wrote something intemperate.

I'm not proud of that, and have no intention of doing it again, but I did and do think it's rude not to reply at all. "Thanks for the patch; don't know when I'll have time to look at it" is enough. I did, after all, go to the trouble to track down the bug and devise and test a fix.

I have gotten upset about a submitted patch going unmerged, also, but only after a couple of years had passed. I agree, pressing maintainers to merge one's patches promptly reflects a certain self-centeredness.

[JangoSteve]

> ...but I did and do think it's rude not to reply at all. "Thanks for the patch; don't know when I'll have time to look at it" is enough.

You're probably right. All I can say is, when you get 100-200 emails a day, every day (it doesn't stop), it's hard. That's not an excuse nor a justification. it's just a statement, an explanation at best.

Also understand that your expectation of a maintainer's response, however small or trivial, is at direct odds with the time they spend working at their day job, or spending time with their family, or relaxing. That's not to say open source maintainers don't enjoy building and maintaining open source projects. Most do (including me). It's just the recognition that maintaining open source projects comes at the expense of other things which they also enjoy.

In the same way that I believe you're justified in thinking a maintainer's non-response is rude, I believe a maintainer would be justified in thinking your expectation of them is also rude.

[ScottBurson]

> ... when you get 100-200 emails a day, every day (it doesn't stop), it's hard

Fair enough. In that kind of situation, the only hope may be to use an autoresponder with a canned message. (This would at least assure senders their messages were received.) And try to recruit some co-maintainers :-)

[voltagex_]

Yep, ran into the programmer's-autoresponder for the first time from the dev of the AlarmDroid app for Android. It's pretty effective.

[chr1]

>responding to new threads on the mailing list -- not just to existing threads

Not all threads are the same, some are very easy to respond, and some require a lot of thinking.

The hardest pull requests are those which are useful in some way, but not really ready to be merged, and maintainer needs to do quite a lot of work to either explain what is wrong with pr or to rework it.

saying "Thanks for the patch; don't know when I'll have time to look at it" as a default response and leaving it for a month isn't very useful, and if it is a "default response", one can assume he got it just by sending pr and not getting other response.

[GoodIntentions]

I see people in this discussion getting wrapped up about manners and expectations. What I'd like to contribute is this:

I think in a position that attracts a pile of daily email, you need to be able to triage what you read, saving some ( hopefully few mails ) for later detailed reply, ignoring junk and hammering out a pile of short acknowledgements as you go. It doesn't take much more time to hit reply with "Thanks, go it, will process as time allows" or similar. If you don't do this, you're treating it as junk mail in my opinion and robbing the sender of any acknowledgement. If you've _got_ to ignore valid mails in this fashion, it points to some other workload related issue.