Sorry, maybe I haven't enough software/historical/english culture 
to not miss something, but I don't understand the relation between Git 
and Emacs. AFAIK Git is a replacement for Cvs/Svn, and it seems a 
majority of people agree it is a good replacement.

     As I understand the mail of Linus Torvalds, he is aware that the 
init system may be pretty harmfull and he tries to do his best to reduce 
the scope of its possible nuisances.  He makes clear that it is 
SystemDisease which examplified how much init can be harmfull, but the 
approach of Torvalds remains general.

     Similarly he noticed that Udev wasn't doing the right things and 
didn't want to, and he implemented firmware loading in the kernel and 
developped the devtmpfs to care of device files creation/deletion. If he 
someday finds that any critical part of init can be done in the kernel. 
He will do it, in the spirit of preserving versatility and freedom - I 
understand that those are his intentions.

     Didier