I am naught but a humble developer. Neither rails nor ruby occupies me professionally. All I wanted was rails with view inheritance (look up template with the same name in parent controller if missing in current one). I was not alone to want it. And by no means the first who tried to do it. So, I pretty much summarized other people work and submitted patch for rails 2.3.X. Turned out, that this feature should have been first applied to edge rails (3-0 branch) and then 'backported' to 2.3. Fair enough. The ticket changed milestone (2.X -> 3.0) and owner (Josh Peek -> Yehuda Katz) and I set myself up for another patch.Months were passing with zero activity when suddenly a guy called Rizwan Reza started answering questions. Strangely enough, Rizwan wasn't really in the techy bits, instead he was passing messages to and from Yehuda. As if he was a proxy or something. A bit weird, but heck, as long as the process goes on, why should I care? Sadly, after a while, Rizwan disappeared. As mysteriously and inevitably as he had emerged in the first place.Meanwhile, Yehuda posted this blog entry , which was all reasonable, apart from, considering the above, it was nothing but a load of hypocritical boolshit. Being slightly irritated, I suggested in the comment that there might be quite possibly other means of applying Yehuda's eagerness to be helpful to noob contributors. Like, perhaps, admitting they actually exist rather than pretending they are an excuse to write another blog post. Yehuda quickly replied with a very reassuring comment where he, first of all, apologized and then shed some positive light on how this feature is in fact much desired and how it is going to get through in next rails beta. It was one month ago. Needless to say that no change has happened on the ticket since then.I had also another experience contributing to open source. It was for jQuery Flot (a very nice plot library). The project is a lot smaller than rails obviously and the change was trivial. A month after ticket submission, the guy suddenly emerged asking for details. Surprised, I put more info, but, it turned out I had only one shot - he had already disappeared. This time forever.So, is this a common scenario? Or is it just a bad luck (or, perhaps, not so bad, compared to what others experience)?