[superboum]

The kernel documentation defines some tag conventions, one of them is "Suggested-by". Its definition:

  A Suggested-by: tag indicates that the patch idea is suggested by the person named and ensures credit to the person for the idea.
  Please note that this tag should not be added without the reporter's permission, especially if the idea was not posted in a public forum. 
  That said, if we diligently credit our idea reporters, they will, hopefully, be inspired to help us again in the future.

It could have been more appropriate to the situation, I think it's convey better the idea that you have found a solution to a problem, but because you are not familiar with the project, the exact syntax of your patch has not been kept.

Ref: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[leereeves]

I haven't compared the patches but a comment below [1] says:

> The only difference between the patch that was accepted and the one that was proposed is where the fix is. In one case it's in an ifdef outside of an if. In the other it's in an inner if statement. That's it. This is a difference in style not a technical difference in the patch at all.

It sounds like the author did quite a bit more than "suggest" the patch idea. They debugged the issue and wrote an entire patch which was accepted with one small change.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37672558

[jacquesm]

That works, but probably it works better in the context of things that are not reported as security issues where speed and accuracy matter more than form, the kernel maintainers did the right thing by crediting the person as 'Reported-by', your 'Suggested-by' would make things a bit better but clearly isn't what the OP is looking for, they want to be labelled 'Kernel contributor' based on a miniscule patch.

[shadowgovt]

They should be listed as a kernel contributor based on a miniscule patch.

Lines of code modified is a notoriously bad signal for estimating the significance of software engineering contributions. And at the end of the day, credit is damn near free to give out and volunteer projects ought to let it run like water.

[renewiltord]

Well, they're not going to send in any more work that requires this standard of debugging, so the kernel will remain insecure in those ways. That isn't great, but perhaps we'll each just have our own preferred kernel flavors like how a bunch of us would use Con Kolivas's alternate scheduler back in the day.

And that way, forks being present, attribution is required for copyright and hence, copyleft.