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.

Regardless of deserved credit your reputation in the kernel community will be that of a drama llama at least for awhile. Making a mountain out of a mole hill, will be remembered, does not play well with others.

I'm not saying you don't deserve credit, but the method you went about emoting over this event will be noticed by community managers, not just the kernel community. Be aware of how your reputation is developed. Lots of us had to eat some humble pie in our career development.

If you had spun this in your personal blog on how you helped fix a kernel bug, and spoke of the positives, then you would be seen as more of a team player, plays well with others, doesn't get bogged down on small issues.

Our character isn't defined when times are good, but with how we deal with adversity.

Did a bit more digging through the mailing list (also looking through the links posted on the HN thread), and to me it looks a bit weird.

OP came up with an initial patch (Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:36 PM) that wasn't deemed to be good enough to be merged. Maintainer came up with a different patch (Tue, 7 Jun 2022 00:34:56 +1000) saying "but I wanted to fix it differently". OP then posted a reworked patch (Fri Jun 10 17:15:49 AEST 2022) that looks a lot more similar to the maintainer's patch.

The maintainer's patch and OP's reworked patch look quite similar, but from what I can see from the mailing list, the maintainer actually came up with that approach, and OP didn't then credit the maintainer in his reworked patch. @kairos@programming.dev can you please clarify, what am I missing?

I'm surprised there's not more discussion of the ~~git~~ GitHub co-author feature here.

A simple co-author line in the final commit sounds like an appropriate way to use the best final code while also giving due credit.

I submitted a pull request to Vim and the maintainer thanked me, tweaked it, and my name is not in the commit history because of it. I use to be bitter about it, if only a little. So I know how you feel but I put significantly less time into mine so the magnitude of the feeling is much smaller for me. My name is still there in the GitHub pull request though. Just like your name is still in the commit itself and in the mailing list. Try not to fret too much about the specifics of your name being in the author field. It's really just a technical detail.

It sucks but it is what it is. I don't think treating this like you were slighted is appropriate.

I feel like the takeaway here should be that the experience of contributing to the project was not great. That's it.

There is value in complaining, even if you don't have solutions. You can only make people aware of the consequences that their actions have caused by telling them.

I don't even take issue with him posting this publicly to his own Dev blog. I think its a perfectly fine piece of on-the-job experience OP has shared. Maybe in a few years he would like to come back to it with a different perspective.

I do however think that OP posting this here (and apparently other boards) is a choice I don't agree with. I think OP would have been better served writing a response email to the maintainer, explaining how they felt. Beyond that, what can one do?