We are involved in a similar effort to add features to mod_auth_cas. While the project maintainer is far from unresponsive, it's clear he has other responsibilities and attends to the project as time allows. We are making demonstrable progress toward having our features merged into the project, but the process has taken longer than anticipated. What has worked for us:

- Be Professional
We followed the recommended procedure for submitting the patch, have been responsive in addressing questions, and have tweaked the patch when asked. Throughout we've maintained an attitude of humility, which makes friends and influences people.

- Be Patient
Provide adequate time for your submission to be evaluated. Like so many open source projects, the maintainer probably handles the project in his "spare" time.

- Be Assertive
Inquire about the status of your submission regularly via communication channels the project provides. The frequency of your inquiries should be reasonable; nags are easily dismissed. Inquiries that express a sincere willingness to be part of the solution are particularly effective. Also, you may consider contacting other folks personally that may have influence upon the project. If you can't get the maintainer's attention, maybe you can get the attention of a trusted colleague who will encourage the maintainer to take a look. I believe this point in particular was helpful in getting our patch reviewed and acted upon.

Good luck. From a cursory review of your project goals, it sounds like your contributions would be sincerely valuable for pam_krb5. I'm pretty sure we could make use of it at our University.

M

vista has never hung up on me. individual apps have but their processes can be easily killed. ubuntu 8.04 (lts?), with its default settings freezes up atleast once a month when changing virtual desktops. and since compiz has crashed, and your mouse pointer is frozen, the keyboard is not recognizing shortcuts, the only way is to pull the plug.

Coming from a Windows background, where the GDI runs in kernel space, this _would_ be your only option when a mouse cursor freezes in Windows. But since X runs as a user process, you can kill it via CTRL-ALT-Backspace. Try that next time, if there is a next time.

While I'm at it, I'll plug for Ubuntu. It's by far the best Java development platform I've ever used. I use Eclipse for the GUI goodness and productivity features of an IDE, but I use Apache Ant and Maven in a terminal for packaging builds. I regularly write scripts to automate repetitive tasks; it's just a natural thing to do in a Unix environment. When I try to do similar things in Windows I find myself cursing the limitations of the command interpreter and bemoaning the poor integration of Powershell.

M

I call bullshit on your experience reporting Ubuntu bugs. I have read a _number_ of Ubuntu bug reports and there is a clear pattern:

"Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. ... Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!"

I'm quoting above from a response I received yesterday, but search the bug tracker and you'll see the pattern for yourself.

What may vary is whether the submitter actually took the time to include enough information to help developers resolve the problem. Either way a friendly and polite response follows; either thanks for the submission, or instructions on what additional information is needed.

Bug tracker comments indicate the Ubuntu developers are not just professional, but helpful and friendly.