What does the size of the kernel have to do with "monolithic development"?
Think of the kernel archive as a way to easily get at the work of hundreds
of people.
For the same reason people buy ready-made CD-ROMs from Redhat and SuSE,
you want to have one common repository for the kernel, because anything
else just leads to horrible confusion. That doesn't mean that the
_development_ happens in that common repository.
Think of me as CVS with a brain and with some taste. Nothing more, nothing
less. Development is done all over the world, and something has to keep it
reasonably coherent, so that when people want to find a kernel that
compiles most of the time and does what they expect, they can do so.
Most of the stuff is completely independent of each other, and you can
live in your own microkernel universe 99% of the time. But having a
central repository means that when global changes are needed, they CAN be
done. It's painful, and it breaks code, but at least it is technically
possible - which it wouldn't be with everything scattered all over.
Linus
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