It's hubris to think that the issue with a parser to identify whitespaces properly is warranting to change code in the KERNEL of arguably the most widespread operating system in the world.

And THEN not even providing more justification for this in the description.

I'm not claiming anywhere that Linus is the good guy. Or bad guy.

In this case I agree with his stance that whatever this parser is, it should better fail harder in order to get it fixed.

And if you know how he reacts when he's making a big deal of something, you know that this one isn't one of those times...