Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at said:
but it's far from easy for somebody who's not already an experienced upstream kernel developer to manage that, LKML is a tough place: there's politics making it hard for new contributors to get their stuff in, there are many rules (technical, cosmetic (i.e. code formatting rules), and social) you have to learn over the time,
I've heard this before, but I didn't find it to be that much different than any other project where I've contributed changes. I think the biggest annoyance was that, because the kernel project is so big and hierarchical, you don't always get a lot of feedback (even when one of the maintainers picks up your patch in their tree to go upstream).