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Comment on Linus on keeping a clean git history (2009)parent

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Based on what I've seen from popular open-source Python projects I've used in the past (Fabric, Haystack and basically anything else by daniel lindsley) having a single human gatekeeper is the express lane to hell. If you do that make sure you have at least a few core contribs who can approve commits.

Linus is the single gatekeeper of Linux.

No, he isn't. He's the final gatekeeper but there are several of lower level gatekeepers/maintainers for different parts.

At least according to rumors, I've never invested the time to get involved myself.

There are an awful lot of maintainers for smaller individual pieces/subsytems of the kernel. Take a look at the MAINTAINERS file to see who is responsible for the smaller chunks:

  grep -B1 ^M: /usr/src/linux-kernel/MAINTAINERS

I've never even looked at any linux source code, but I still know there's too much of it to believe Linus reviews and signs off on every single commit personally.

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