I receive requests for support and code additions to rsyslog every day and I am grateful so many people express their interest and see rsyslog as a useful tool.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that I can not do everything and I also can not do many things as quickly as I would like to. Also, I have to admit, there are some things that I do not like to do, at least as a cost-free activity. The typical example is work that benefits only a single or small subset of commercial organizations.
I suggest that you read a bit about my philosophy on how open source projects are paid philosophy. Note that “payment” includes for more things other than money, for example good suggestions and bug reports.
I tend to follow this priority scheme, with some variations:
- security-related issues
- serious problems in the current release
- serious problems in previous releases
- paid work
- things useful to the community at large
- things useful to smaller parts of the community (with descending priority)
- support for non-commercial folks
- bugs in older releases already fixed in newer ones
- activities aiding only commercial organizations
The term “things useful” is deliberately vague. Among others, it involves fixing bugs, adding new features and following support requests. However, support requests usually fall only in that category if either a bug is involved or I can gain some more insight into things that need to be changed (like better doc, general user needs, etc…).
Note that, as of my philosophy, I try to avoid doing work for free that only benefits a commercial party, but neither me personally nor the project. If you find this harsh, read my in-depth explanation of that philosophy.