The difficulty in getting fixes accepted to open source projects
Two and a half years ago I noticed the Apache mod_dumpio module does not include null bytes (or the data which follows those null bytes) in its output. So I searched the Apache Bugzilla database and found bz#57045 which someone had opened a year earlier. So I wrote a patch and attached it to the bugzilla issue. When I noticed the issue I was using the then current 2.4.16 release. There have been 13 bug fix releases since then (it’s now at 2.4.29) and my fix still hasn’t been applied. I’m a senior software engineer with nearly four decades of experience. I’m pretty confident my fix is a) correct and b) well written. It really shouldn’t be this hard to get fixes made to open source software.