Anyone who has ever had to work on a large system will instantly recognize what he's done here, and admire his approach, and light a candle in support of ever getting this patched all the way through the various broken projects. Remember, he's got to get a patch approved for gcc to get this to work, and only once that is done, in production, and generally available will he be able to submit a patch for ls. This is the reality of disparate projects with many maintainers and schedules. This may seem to be a trivial example, but it is entirely indicative of the process.