Harvard Business School of Echec

I have a commit access to GNOME svn, so i'm able to do whatever i want with my code, and then commit it. My main free software contribution has been GNOME for a long time.
I've recently started to hack on awffull (log analyser, it's a webalizer fork, but webalizer is dead). I keep submitting patches on the mailing lists, i'm mainly interested in memory usage, which is a real issue with huge logs, and even more on 32bits (allocating more than 2GiB is risky). One of my patch provides a 7% memory usage improvement by using flexible arrays : this saves millions of malloc calls so heap admin / malloc overhead is much lower.

But, even if Steve (upstream) and the mailing list people are great and very responsive, my patches have not been merged yet. I totally understand why they are not already merged, but i have no way to provide my branch to other awffull fans. So i started stacking everything in a local git repository. But now I need again and again to resplit the patches because upstream just can't merge my changes. I now realize how much we need distributed control system (git, monotone, etc). Without it, patches get lost on mailing lists, they get obsolete, they don't apply anymore ... a big waste of work.

With a distributed control system, upstream is able to pull from contributors, merge or cherrypick.

I'm frustrated about awffull, i now better understand how people could be frustrated about GNOME.
I am sorry for everyone (hackers, packagers, etc) who work hard on free software but are unable to (easily) get their job upstream because of the stupid VCS we are still using.