Somebody is pretty salty for no good reason. The maintainers own patch is nicer code than the suggested patch - and the change is small enough that there just isn’t anything available to guide the reporter to a better solution without wasting everyone’s time.
I’d probably have added a thanks for debugging effort into the commit message myself - but “please accept my patch because I want to have code in the kernel” is a very stupid thing to say, and the maintainer offering a suitable problem to fix is more than I’d have done in that situation.
As someone who had a mildly unpleasant interaction with kernel folks, I can totally understand the issue.
This is one of the very few open source projects I had the feeling they don’t appreciate new contributers. There is no on boarding material available and picking the wrong subproject mailing list results in being ignored. You have to spend days without any possibility of help and if your are lucky you get mentioned as a reporter. For the next issue you start from square one as there was no guidance, so you could only learn the bare minimum.
So yeah, his patch may be underwhelming. But the help and credit he got for days or weeks of unpaid work was basically nothing. You may be okay with spending days and only getting credits for the bug report, but I suspect many aren’t and will not contribute again after such an experience. And post like this try to point out the issue they have and why many people won’t contribute to the kernel ever again.
