> One the one hand people expect OpenVPN to be rock-solid in both > stability and security. In order to maintain this standard of quality, > there needs to be a rigorous process of patch vetting. On the other > hand, as an open source project, OpenVPN needs to be transparent and > open to contributions from the community.
That misses the main issue: you can reject most patches on some stability ground, but then as a contributor I'd like to know how to improve my patch to make it acceptable. E.g. my "fqdn route with fqdn's that map to multiple IPs" patch (which I consider to be a bug-fix rather than a feature addition) has been somewhat discussed but only w.r.t the functionality, not the actual code, so I have no idea what I need to do in order to have it be accepted. This is frustrating. This said, as a maintainer of a Free Software package, I am quite aware that giving responding to all contributions (let alone giving good feedback) can be challenging. Stefan