My biggest question is, did he have "permission" to commit ?
AFAIK: no. But I got involved with this package just a couple of weeks ago, so I don't know of any "grandfather" rules :) And Antonio has committed bugfixes to HTTP_Upload before. There must be a reason why he has the priviledges ;-)
Since IMO it's rude to commit something before letting the author know,
or QA if the package doesn't have any active developer, or maybe even
email PEAR-Dev about it first?
Yep, I consider it very rude; but if it helps the package, I'd like to try to find a way to work it out.
Regards
Christian