I hate to say this, but most of the time, I just fork it, fix it, and forget it.
That may sound like I'm not being a good community member. But, most of the time, dealing with the maintainers is more effort than I have time for.
That may sound like I'm not being a good community member. But, most of the time, dealing with the maintainers is more effort than I have time for.
When you say you like to just fork it, do you mean that you're publishing the fixes you make somewhere, or just keeping them to yourself?
I am very interested in any attempts at some kind of fork aggregator (see [0] and [1]) that can help interested parties see what patches have landed in each fork, rather than just which ones have their own users.
[0]http://forked.yannick.io/jquery/jquery
[1]http://www.toddsifleet.com/projects/github-forks#jquery/jque...
Really depends, some maintainers and authors really dislike forking, they also tend to be the ones hardest to deal with on pull requests.
Read my longer comment in this thread about the C4 process and imagine: you send a patch, and it's merged onto project master within half an hour, and you can then depend on it being available to you forever, as long as you invest in some documentation and tests (if it's a new feature).
on multiple occasions I've gotten emails about PRs I made and self-closed with someone thanking me for the start of the general solution, and that finished it up and made it into a full PR.