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Individual developers
work on a particular piece of code. For example, you could be an
expert in how your digital camera works. So you might work on the
USB device driver that handles your camera.
- Maintainers
work on subsystems. There is a list of kernel maintainers [8].
They handle such things as the quota subsystem, the block device
drivers, the PPC64 architecture, etc. The whole kernel is broken
up into areas of responsibility. Maintainers accept changes (patches)
from individual developers, apply them, test them, and integrate them
into larger changesets to be forwarded upward.
- Linus Torvolds
is the top of the development pile. He only accepts changes that
have come thru the appropriate maintainers and then only if he
agrees with them. Thus he controls what goes into the official
kernel. There are people, like Andrew Morten, that maintain their
own ``branch'' of the kernel. The Morten kernel can be built
using the ``-mm'' switch which includes and/or excludes certain
things that Linus has not accepted.
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2004-02-24