Accepting drive-by patches carries an enormous cost. It’s very common to need to rewrite them substantially.
Regardless, this individual received a reported-by credit. That’s more than adequate.
"just fine" is not what we aim for. "just fine" is probably what they thought of the OpenSSL library before heartbleed.
> Accepting drive-by patches carries an enormous cost. It’s very common to need to rewrite them substantially.
Sure but it sounds like you're making a generalization about a specific instance you know nothing about. There doesn't seem to be an enormous cost detailed by the maintainer in the email thread. Just that he'd rather gatekeep the project and rob someone of the opportunity for contribution.
This individual wasn’t robbed of the opportunity for a contribution. He received credit for his contribution via a reported-by flag. It’s a tiny patch — all the work was in identifying the bug, which is what he received credit for.
He did something valuable, and has every right to write it up, but clearly has limited understanding of the development process he’s participating in. It was wildly inappropriate of him to of put anyone on blast in response to this.
I have a similar experience with a bug fix I submitted and the decision to delay my fix to literally change the whole architecture of the project left a bad taste in my mouth. After that I stopped contributing to the project and just kept my fixes to myself.
It's especially annoying when the maintainer asks for help and pulls this. Architecture changes after proposing small fixes to projects has been a somewhat common occurrence for me.