[justinsaccount]

What are you talking about? It was explained multiple times that the released tarball had broken timestamps.

> I also don't want to criticize the author for not pushing a patch they don't understand.

This issue had absolutely nothing to do with patches. The maintainer published a broken tarball. The users were asking the maintainer to re-publish a non-broken tarball.

[edmccard]

>The users were asking the maintainer to re-publish a non-broken tarball.

Yes, with such helpful suggestions as changing to a fresh directory because the original directory was "corrupt". Except that wouldn't have fixed it; the problem was eventually discovered to be a bug in npm on Windows[1], so every single "republished" package would have also been broken.

[1]https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/16734

[justinsaccount]

And the maintainers have not re-published a fixed tarball yet and the issue remains closed. Even after the underlying issue has been fixed in npm.

I think it's pretty clear which side here is acting inappropriately.