> 1) git will not accept the push because it's not on top of current master branch, person B needs to fetch and merge/rebase before pushing again.
But is this not the right thing to do? A kernel is a complex piece of software. Changes in one place can have very non-obvious consequences in other places (think of changes that cause deadlock because locks are applied in the wrong order). Of course, it is theoretically nice if I know that a change to e.g. documentation or fixing a typo in a comment is not affecting the Ethernet driver or the virtual file system layer, but this is down to the architecture of the project - this is not something that a version control system can prove.
Given that, it seems desirable to me that the source tree has as few different variations, permutations how to get there, and so on, as possible, since this makes testing and things like bisecting for something like a broken lock or another invariant much easier.
But is this not the right thing to do? A kernel is a complex piece of software. Changes in one place can have very non-obvious consequences in other places (think of changes that cause deadlock because locks are applied in the wrong order). Of course, it is theoretically nice if I know that a change to e.g. documentation or fixing a typo in a comment is not affecting the Ethernet driver or the virtual file system layer, but this is down to the architecture of the project - this is not something that a version control system can prove.
Given that, it seems desirable to me that the source tree has as few different variations, permutations how to get there, and so on, as possible, since this makes testing and things like bisecting for something like a broken lock or another invariant much easier.