It's certainly part this, but also part experience. You get a feeling for who the people in charge of kernel subsystems are and how they like their changes afte

It's certainly part this, but also part experience. You get a feeling for who the people in charge of kernel subsystems are and how they like their changes after a while. That goes a long way towards acceptance; there's a lot more human interaction under the surface of kernel dev than people think. Obviously this is an extreme case, but it scales. Something like 8 years ago I noticed something was horribly wrong with the ARM32 boot wrapper, submitted a fix, and my approach was mostly shot down by the maintainer. Last week I submitted a 34-patch RFC series to finally add WiFi support for 5 years' worth of Macs (which required quite a bit of new scaffolding in that driver, as well as fixes and new features) and it's gotten positive reviews so far, modulo nits. I wouldn't have been able to pull that off 8 years ago. And it's not like I spent those 8 years doing kernel dev, but I've sent in a few fixes and watched how other kernel developers work. I started on a big kernel project a year ago and all that sitting and watching has been very helpful in putting out stuff that people like.