Best way to help a maintainer?

[Andy Burns]

For a few packages in extras I've filed bugs, made patches and build 
rpms locally to fix bugs, upgrade versions or see if rebuilds are all 
that is required to get packages working again.

It is obvious that some (all!) maintainers are busy, that is fair 
enough, we all have "day jobs" that will get priority, but sometimes 
it's frustrating to have helped out (only a tiny bit) and yet it doesn't 
lead to an updated package becoming available.

I'm not talking about situations where a packages needs "rescuing" by 
having a new maintainer, A) who's to say that new is better, B) I don't 
want to seem ungrateful for the work of the maintainers.

In general, what is the best way to see if any patch/upgrades that I 
think are beneficial, are really the whole story, i.e. will work on 
multiple arches, won't confuse the build system and are not retrograde 
changes?

As a non-maintainer, is it possible to do this all locally, is plague 
required, can we have access to the build system, just to be able to 
test out patches up to the point where it possible to hand it back to 
the maintainer, as a hopefully simple option for them to verify and 
commit it?

I suppose I'm asking is the situation, one package, one maintainer, one 
bottleneck?

Thanks,
Andy "I only want to help, don't take this as a complaint" Burns.