A flag is a name for a bit position. Not code.

The change itself was obviously still controversial. It's reserving a bit to a system call that affects all filesystems, and it was pushed in by one filesystem maintainer because his company needed it for out of tree code that was NACKed.

It still should have been posted for comments. Even if it suffered more NACKs, Ted could have posted it to Linus and stated that this is the best solution so far, and it's currently in use by Google. Linus currently seems to be fine with the change, and could have pulled it regardless of the NACKs by other maintainers. He's done things like that before. If that had happened, the other maintainers may have their feelings hurt, but at least everything was out in the open and honest.

I go back to my original statement. It may be a one-liner, but its against a system call and for out of tree code that has been NACKed before. It's not a trivial fix nor a merge conflict. It should have been discussed.