I’m in a situation where some minor patches I’ve submitted to an open-source project were ignored or explicitly not accepted.
I consider them useful, but more important is that I need the functionality they implement.
I don’t want to push my ideas and suggestions anymore to the main contributors, because I don’t want to turn this into an ego issue. I’ve decided that my best bet would be just to use what I wrote for my own purposes. I don’t want to fork the whole source code tree because I like how things are generally working, I’m just not happy with details.
But I do realize that the project will evolve and I would like to use the new features that will eventually appear. I understand that I’ll have to merge all new things into my own source tree. Are there any best practices for this scenario?
If you are using Git, or could get used to use it, perhaps you should take a look at Stacked Git or Guilt.
They are layers on top of Git to keep track of patches.