parts of the community, if I recall correctly, and to be clear to everyone else since I'm sure you know this:
1. linus didn't use version control at all, he just got patches emailed to him, then every now and then he'd publish a tarball and incremental patches (e.g. a 2.4.11-rc2 patch on top of 2.4.11-rc1) - the world had no visibility into his tree's development aside from the tarballs and inter-version patches he sent out
2. and because of that, no one else used version control for submitting changes, they just sent patches to lkml
3. there was some use of CVS for some ports / subsystems, but again, it was used to generate patches to email to linus
4. people built lots of tools around this work flow, like `patchwork` and horrible shell scripts
1. linus didn't use version control at all, he just got patches emailed to him, then every now and then he'd publish a tarball and incremental patches (e.g. a 2.4.11-rc2 patch on top of 2.4.11-rc1) - the world had no visibility into his tree's development aside from the tarballs and inter-version patches he sent out
2. and because of that, no one else used version control for submitting changes, they just sent patches to lkml
3. there was some use of CVS for some ports / subsystems, but again, it was used to generate patches to email to linus
4. people built lots of tools around this work flow, like `patchwork` and horrible shell scripts