Software longevity is something that I have bene thinking about for a little bit.<p>At $dayjob, we use Openstack, an open source cloud infrastructure project.<p>It's a pretty complicated set of projects that interact to each other in order to provide multi-tenancy for virtual machines at scale.<p>It was initially all the rage, before the cloud starting really picking up steam.<p>So now, you have a massive project that is slowly losing traction, but also relying on that notoriety to gain developers.<p>So, I think Linus point is quite valid. These small, low risk, low value patches are essential in having a healthy community around a product.<p>They help easing your way into a codebase, developpement flow and all the other idiosyncrasies of established tech circles.
How trival are we talking? I haven't merged someone else's code, but I'd think that for sufficiently trivial patches, the maintainer just reads it and copy-pastes most of it manually to the relevant place in the code. This seems no bother.