[CyruzDraxs]

The contributor also had not signed a CLA, and the commit message did not follow the guidelines.

Ben should have been more explicit in his initial post about his reason for denying the commit. Isaac shouldn't have merged the pull, which violated the guidelines. The community shouldn't have raised their pitchforks without first seeking an explanation.

Everyone involved could use a dose of professionalism.

[Lazare]

God yes. It feels like everyone involved went out of their way to make things worse at every step.

An invalid but well-meaning pull request? Better give it a cryptic rejection. A rejected by politically sensitive pull request? Better pull rank and force its acceptance in violation of project guidelines. Main project backers violating project guidelines? Better reverse their commits with a passive aggressive commit message. Project lead reversing commits? Better post a vitriolic blog post about how he is a terrible asshole who should be fired!

Would it have been that hard to bounce a couple of emails back and forth, and sort it all out in private? Christ.

(Add good point about the CLA. Although needing a CLA to change a pronoun in the docs seems silly, I think it highlights that a pull request was the wrong tool for this.)

[CyruzDraxs]

A signed CLA may seem silly, but there were changes in code comments. That makes code ownership ambiguous, and the law doesn't tend to play nice with ambiguity.

[Lazare]

Oh, I know. You shouldn't play games with code ownership; CLAs are important for any commit.

I was just thinking that this could have been handled better via an email to a committer who already had a signed CLA. Would have sidestepped a lot of drama. Oh well.