Small patches get in!

While there is a considerable amount of research on analyzing the change information stored in software repositories, only few researcher have looked at software changes contained in email archives in form of patches. In this paper we look at the email archives of two open source projects and answer questions like the following: How many emails contain patches? How long does it take for a patch to be accepted? Does the size of the patch influence its chances to be accepted or the duration until it gets accepted? Obviously, the answers to these questions can be helpful for the authors of patches, in particular because some of the answers are surprising.