Well, except that his fix can't easily be pushed back into the source tree because he doesn't know what other software is only working because of the original fix. Presumably it must have been needed by at least one other person, probably also after a crazy long debugging session, or it wouldn't have been there at all. As this code is in a public repo for the default library of a well-used language, it's pretty much a given that fixing this by just removing those lines will cause a regression for someone.