In theory, yes. And I never used to worry about this. But over time, in practice, it's been a bigger problem than I think you're giving credit to.
e.g. ...
"Even if you have 200 people submitting patches, the odds are that most of them fall into two categories: people fixing the same bug, and people working on completely different sections of code. Neither is a substantial problem to merge."
IME ... in practice, this is a HUGE problem. Because every one of those developers fixes the bug in a slightly different way.
The longer time goes on without the original Author fixing it, the worse it gets. And the cost to them - or anyone! - of sifting through the "100 variations on bug fix #123" becomes greater and greater.
Usually, you want to cherrypick individual lines and characters from 5-10 of the best "solutions" to the bug.
If you'd avoided the "100 alternative fixes", then those "improved" solutions would have been built on the "basic" solutions - and merging would be easy.
But because you've got to this massively-forked scenario, all of the patches have been written independently and incompatibly.
Not in practice. In practice, people base their work on the most recent work. You get maybe 4-5 versions of any given bug fix, max, proportionally to how easy it is to fix.
In theory, yes. And I never used to worry about this. But over time, in practice, it's been a bigger problem than I think you're giving credit to.
e.g. ...
"Even if you have 200 people submitting patches, the odds are that most of them fall into two categories: people fixing the same bug, and people working on completely different sections of code. Neither is a substantial problem to merge."
IME ... in practice, this is a HUGE problem. Because every one of those developers fixes the bug in a slightly different way.
The longer time goes on without the original Author fixing it, the worse it gets. And the cost to them - or anyone! - of sifting through the "100 variations on bug fix #123" becomes greater and greater.
Usually, you want to cherrypick individual lines and characters from 5-10 of the best "solutions" to the bug.
If you'd avoided the "100 alternative fixes", then those "improved" solutions would have been built on the "basic" solutions - and merging would be easy.
But because you've got to this massively-forked scenario, all of the patches have been written independently and incompatibly.