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Three-year Anniversary of Kernel Traffic
Eric Gibson writes: "Thought everybody might want to know, today is the three-year anniversary of kernel traffic. The site for those of us that want to like to keep up with the goings-on of the kernel mailing list, but can't afford to read 1500+ emails a day. ;-) Congratulations to the maintainer who has kept this site alive, through trial and tribulation."
The site says that, last week, there were a little over 2700 emails total...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I see comments like this one regularly, and I'm really not sure why. I'm a subscriber to the kernel mailing list, and rarely get over 100 emails a day (max 150), all of which get dumped into a kernel-traffic folder which is quite easy to browse through and delete, as well as keep one's self up-to-date on kernel developments. I would think the more people involved in Linux kernel development with _constructive_ bug reports the better things would be. Comments like this really aren't doing anything besides giving a false impression, and would certainly encourage anyone looking for some good reading material to sign up and set aside a mail folder for it.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Another option for the bandwidth-limited are the web archives, where you can somewhat easily pick out the topics of interest.
The only word of warning is that people don't change the thread subject lines by convention, so the subject almost never matches the particular flame war that's going on. (The Kernel Traffic summaries generally ignore most of the interesting flamage, focusing on the prouncements of the bigwigs.)
There is also a usenet front-end (which I think is what Linus uses), as well as a Google archive
The linux-kernel mailing list is available via nntp at fa.linux.kernel. If you have a news reader that does scoring (e.g. gnus it makes the traffic all that much more manageable.
dan.
When I first started getting interested in the kernel I subscribed to the mailing list and was immediately overwhelmed by the traffic. I soon found Kernel Traffic and unsubscribed from the mailing list and was happy.
The truth is, though, that while KT gives a good overview of some areas of the mailing list, it misses a lot. This is obvious, of course; cutting 100's of posts a day down to one moderate weekly summary is going to leave a lot of information. But to be honest, though I admire and appreciate Zach Brown's efforts, I wonder what criteria he uses for deciding what threads to cover. I sometimes feel he has left out some fairly important/interesting stuff while quoting huge gobs of somewhat trivial (imho) threads.
Anyone who is seriously interested in the kernel internals shouldn't really be relying on KT too much. Head over to kernelnewbies and start reading the real list. I recommend a good filternig system to help you separate out the chaff, though.
dan.