Conversely why does your determination that an open source project is 'mission critical' to your use case obligate the author to make any changes at all for you?
I don't think the maintainer should be obligated to do anything. It would be courteous to treat it as a bug and maybe even provide a patch so that downstream users can easily fix it, but not an obligation. It looks like this one is already fixed so the point is moot.
If the primary maintainer of 'cat' decided it would be funny to have it output "meow" when run at 00:30 in the morning, it's totally their right to do it. I'd expect a lot of downstream users wouldn't find it that funny and would want to patch it out pretty quickly.
If the primary maintainer of 'cat' decided it would be funny to have it output "meow" when run at 00:30 in the morning, it's totally their right to do it. I'd expect a lot of downstream users wouldn't find it that funny and would want to patch it out pretty quickly.