It's not caused by any permission consideration. The reason we have separate repos is the fact we try to develop our modules to be reusable (therefore to keep them as independent from each other as much it's possible), so merging them into a single repo is not an option. Actually there's a tool which tries to provide this kind of developing: (JetBrain) PhpStrom's integrated Git client. Their tool can pull, push and commit all the repositories inside the whole project together. And as all of our repos are there (actually it's a framework that consists of many individual repos), we can simply commit push and pull all repo alltogether. The reason we still would appreciate this functionality in SmartGit is because we like it's GUI much better (and PhpStorm currently doesn't support Git's index... so no individual lines/selections/hunks can be committed, only whole files).

Yes, independent repositories.

Would be very useful for projects where modularity is a must have and you have 10+ modules in separate repositories and you need to handle them together. Multiple committing would be also useful but I'll create a new topic for that.