A part of this is the "Blessed maintainer" issue, where large patchsets like this that a mere moral submits would end up going through dozens of review/testing

A part of this is the "Blessed maintainer" issue, where large patchsets like this that a mere moral submits would end up going through dozens of review/testing cycles before even being considered by the maintainers of most subsystems. OTHO, the maintainer of said subsystem can write these huge patches, get one of his buddies to ack it, and its in the tree without much comment/testing. As this bug points out, being a maintainer doesn't suddenly make all your code bug free.. EDIT: OTOH, most of the Linus released kernels go through months of bug fixing before they show up in any of the stable distributions. Its the "rolling release" distro's which get hit by these bugs because they have this strange idea that once Linus (or whatever package) releases something its done cooking.