So I would personally certainly not mind somebody doing a
git mv sound drivers/sound
.. edit makefiles and Kconfig files appropriately ..
git commit -a
and it wouldn't be a problem for git (ie the repository wouldn't grow or anything like that).
Of course, the primary question is whether it's really worth.
The obvious drawback is that patches won't be applicable after the
move.
Well, git merging is actually pretty good at this, so you can apply the patches to the old release and then merge it, and it will do the right thing (perhaps not for newly created files, but that's pretty easy to fix up).
Me personally, I've been more irritated by include/asm-xyz vs arch/xyz. It would be so nice if all the arch-specific changes woudl always show up under arch/ (both from a statistics standpoint, and just because then a diffstat really shows arch-specific stuff really obviously, and sorts all the arch-specific stuff together).