Happy new year (almost)!
TL;DR - I've created an additional
public git repository for ratpoison with my patches merged in. (Git is, after all, intended to be multi-homed.) I don't want this to turn into a project fork, but if there's no discussion, that could accidentally happen. This email starts that discussion.
With more text:
I've submitted a number of patches to ratpoison on this list. Most of them haven't made their way into the main source tree, and not because of discussion suggesting they shouldn't. This bothers me on a couple levels. I want to use my own patches. I also want the warm feeling of public credit that comes from seeing my name show up in invocations of "git log". And I'd like to note my contributions to ratpoison on my CV without a reader of my CV thinking I'm lying for lack of mention in the log or the AUTHORS file.
I've pinged Jérémie about this privately, but the conversation didn't start. I assume he's busy rather than ignoring me, and this email is in no way an _expression_ of animosity. So, since I don't have commit privileges to the official repository, I've begun committing to mine. This shouldn't be a problem, git was designed to be multi-homed and to facilitate pulling patches and merging between repositories. I realized recently that I'd slowed down on my contributions to ratpoison because I was concerned that patches would become increasingly difficult to apply if they were all left in a pile for a later date. I'm also concerned that if these become my private patches, I will in essence be running my own private window manager, which is not my goal.
This concern is not entirely theoretical. On the ratpoison wiki, we list a number of patches. Those that have not been applied to the main source tree are sometimes no longer present (links to hosts no longer available) or don't merge cleanly. A patch without a user community behind it is dead code. (This also suggests that the wiki could do with some love.)