@pro yeah, c'mon. Such complicated things like patches to the command line args parser tend to be very complicated! so complicated indeed, that every executable in every project tends to reimplement it. so checking for errors uses a wee bit of time.
imagine they had checked it in a mere matter of months. probably someone'd exploited it to do an rm -fr (remove all files in french) or such like. no, 22 1/2 year for such fine a piece of engineering are just about right.
look, here in germany we're still typing to improve 19th century tech. so, all in all, this was quite fast.

just out of curiosity: did you mail in the patch on punch cards or was it a disc, already? (kidding) ;-)