It should be in the best ineterests of the project to provide as much feedback as possible, and should improve not only amount of accepted code (by encouraging developers provide more comments/explanations/tests/etc. and more actively discuss possible ways to fix a particular bug), but also code quality and help developers better understand what could be improved in future submissions. Silently marking a patch as 'pending' doesn't help with that at all. Consider that if two my patches for SetParent would be accepted one year ago but not one year later (without a single change but just afer asking once again what's wrong with them), that fundamental SetParent bug could be already fixed long time ago.