Maintainer Persona

The shape of a submission is a property of the target repository, not of the finding. Body length, title convention, whether a test is expected, who reviews and how outsiders are treated all differ between repositories, and all of them are measurable from the target's own history. In one large OSS project, of 44 PRs whose authors had never had a PR merged there, 13 were merged, 9 were closed by a maintainer and 22 were closed by an automated check. What decided the outcome was the automation, not being new. Measure the target, keep the numbers in a file, and write to them.

When to use

• Filing an issue or PR in a repository whose maintainers are not you.
• Sending a failing test or a fix to another team inside your organisation.
• A submission was ignored, split, or asked to be rewritten, and you want to know why before the next one.