What about pulling changes from downstream ?

What about pulling changes from downstream ?

I think it's less work for a downstream maintainer to send an email to the upstream maintainer than to maintain the patch in such a way that "pull" works. And looking at the total effort by everyone, I'm sure the email is considerably less work. But probably less reliable.

I sometimes get pointed to lists of downstream patches for packages I maintain. I find it very hard to glean defect information from them. One of the reasons is the open source tradition of not documenting beyond the code itself. It often takes quite a bit of effort to figure out what the point of a patch is. OTOH, when people email me patches, they almost always include a nice explanation.

It's not a lot of work to send an email, but it's easy to forget.