I personally keep a CVS tree of all my local changes to the kernel so
that I can remerge them relatively easily when new versions come out.
Perhaps others that keep major patches around (mine aren't major)
should do the same. Maybe Linus should as well, but that is up to
him. If he doesn't want to, then he doesn't have to. The way he does
source code control is his perogative. And this is *NOT* to say that
Linus should allow joe random hacker to change his sources.
Anyway, just saying that I, persoanlly, find CVS useful in tracking
kernel releases. If people are interested in a short howto do this, I
could write one up.
Warner