A damn good question. These old school mega merges are widely avoided in most places these days, and with good reason. So the skills for doing this are thin on

A damn good question. These old school mega merges are widely avoided in most places these days, and with good reason. So the skills for doing this are thin on the ground. Plus it’s one of the largest projects in the world and whilst Linus got to grow into the current role over decades, a replacement would be starting on an already speeding train. An obvious solution is modularization and stable internal ABIs, but the Linux community have avoided that approach for a long time, and with good reason.