the debugging *is* the work! the work for which he went uncredited, that's the crux of the whole thing. he got a Reported-By which just means he ran into a bug and told someone about it, not that he root caused it, wrote a patch and bothered to submit it.
This whole thing tastes to me like a pay-off for an unwanted gift, you don't go into this sort of an exchange on a security mailing list expecting kernel contributor credit for fixing a bug. That's just not how it works. Maybe it should work like that but it simply doesn't. OP had pre-set expectations and those were found to be in the wrong, nobody got 'robbed' and misrepresenting the exchange to one that makes the kernel maintainer seem like an asshole when that wasn't at all how it went down makes me feel even less good about the whole thing.
Reported-by ranges the gamut of 'I ran into this bug' to 'I found this issue and here is my patch, which I hope is useful to you'.
If you want to negotiate credit rules for 4 line patches up front you are of course welcome to do so but keep in mind that maintainers can and do accept patches, rewrite them and contribute them under their own name (and their responsibility), especially security patches.
> Maybe it should work like that
Definitely
But the patch was not taken. The maintainer fixed it a different way. So credit is given for reporting the issue and suggesting a fix, and that is what is represented by the Reported-By. Is that so hard to understand?
This entire HN comment section is ridiculous with everyone acting as if the author wrote an entire subsystem and someone else took attribution.
The author here figured out a bug and suggested a fix. It happens that they conmunicated their fix in the form of a patch, but that happens very regularly in kernel land.
In the end the author got a Reported-By, which is entirely appropriate for what happened. If the maintainer accepted the author's patch as-is or with minimal modification then yes, they should get Author attribution. But the patch that was taken was substantially different.
Weirder still because all of this has been done in the open for all of that time, it's not as if how the Linux kernel is maintained is a secret.