Rails bug reports & patches - why no action?

I have noticed at the dev.rubyonrails.org site that many tickets with pretty clear-cut bug reports/patches or feature enhancements don't get any attention. They sit there for months at a time. Why is this? Are tickets from those that are not in rails-core deprioritized? Are there just not enough people that have the power to act on tickets? I know it's not lack of test cases because I see tickets with test cases attached that are also ignored.

I have the same question. I submitted a patch for 4 bugs in 1.6 a few months ago, of which one is still not fixed in 1.2.1, namely the strange reversal of delete and destroy in case of clear on a has_many collection. Of course in this case it is "all hail monkey- patching", but still sad that all this code/maintenance is duplicated.

Of course I understand that it can take time, but I don't think that it would be hard to find more (good/trustworthy) people that are willing to check and integrate patches...

For those impatient, the monkey-patch code below: