> The Linux employees should all be fired for their breach-of-contract with poor Red Hat.
While I appreciate your sarcasm, it is a bit weird that davem dropped that report on the floor altogether for what looks akin to a lack of paperwork.
Not accepting the patch as-is, sure, I get it, process matters. But if the upstream network stack is under your purview one would expect the underlying bug to still be acknowledged, prioritized, and corrected.
This whole thing surprises me since I've interacted with davem via email on multiple occasions. He's always struck me as an asset to the kernel community and caring of upstream issues esp. in the network side.
I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt here and presume he assumed the patch's author would follow-up with the necessary acks if it indeed were a genuine bugfix. A lack of follow-up to a maintainer somewhat implies it was a bogus patch and there was nobody willing to corroborate and sign off on it.
Having worked on other large projects with a maintainer model - there is a general lack of ownership. The engineer who is trying to get their patch merged doesn’t feel ownership of the project, and the maintainer rarely feels ownership of any particular CR.
I don’t know if any better model for a project like Linux, but I’d bet good money that neither author nor maintainer felt like they owned the fix for this bug.
