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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

>These sentences in some parts gloss over the details, and in others it is flat out wrong. Git was designed for tens of thousands of developers (the Linux kernel),

Are there really ten thousand active developers on the Linux Kernel?

According to [1] there were ~ 2,000 over a 15 month period. It's an order of magnitude difference that seems like it would have an impact.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/linux...

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And even then, the kernel doesn’t follow anything like the approach to distributed development that your average Github project does. The kernel consists of a bunch of maintainers who each have their own intake branches, to which other people submit PRs or patches as that maintainer wills; and then the mainline kernel, which only takes contributions via patches from one of the maintainers.

The nearest thing you could compare the development model to is the set of base packages for the BSDs: each subsystem/package has its own upstream development (like the Linux subsystems with their maintainers); and then Linus serves as the release engineer, taking updates to those packages and merging them into the release. (I compare to the BSDs specifically because Linux kernel subsystems, like non-cross-platform BSD base-system packages, have no other life outside of their potential integration into the release. People aren’t using the upstreams directly, other than in development of the new feature.)

I mean, that's the model git was designed for, and it's a model that was designed for a large number of people (by using gatekeepers doing bulk updates to mitigate the flood of small ones).

So I don't think raising the way linux uses git by its original intended users really contradicts the idea that it was designed for a large number of developers?

The article above was actually wrong and has been updated to show that Microsoft has 3,000 active developers instead of the original 20,000 that is quoted here. So it's only a difference of 50%, not a full order of magnitude.

Although you should consider how active those devs are... I'm imagining its far more active than Linux kernel devs... so the activity levels can still be an order of magnitude higher

It's probably more active than some Linux kernel developers (those who don't work on the kernel exclusively), but the majority of Linux kernel developers are employed to do kernel work and so I don't see why there would be a difference in amount of code output by either sets of developers.

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