[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.