Zack Brown Taking a Break

Jon Dowland writes "Zack Brown's once-weekly Kernel Traffic summary of happenings on the linux kernel mailing list, is now on indefinite hiatus. From the announcement: 'Kernel Traffic has become more and more difficult over the years. From an average of 5 megs of email per week in 1999, the Linux kernel mailing list has gradually increased its traffic to 13 megs per week in 2005. Condensing that into 50 or 100 K of summaries each week has started to take more time than I have to give.' Fear not, because we still have kerneltrap and Linux Weekly News, amongst others. Zack still writes a regularly Kernel column for Linux Magazine and occasionally in others such as the UK Linux Format."

Comments

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for nothing. Quitter.

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[timster]

What?

Automate it

[tumanov]

Perhaps a system should be set up where collaborative filtering takes place based on what goes on with the mailing list. Readers could mark certain posts as important and then the most important posts get put into a summary? Can't be that hard to implement, all an editor would have to do is read over the most important posts and create a paragraph or two summary intro.

Re:Automate it

[oringo]

You mean like a /kernel_traffic/.? I bet ReiserFSv4 will get -5 Flame...

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"What?"

OK, for those who didn't get it: Windows admins and developers don't get to participate in a daily Windows "Kernel" thread. So...they avoid having to read 13 megs of stuff each week AND they get to blame Microsoft whenever something goes wrong. (They can't patch Windows core themselves if they find problems.) It's a "win-win"...

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the stupidest thing I've ever read. And I read Slashdot on a regular basis.

Same problem, so copy the solution

[jd]

Zack doesn't scale. Linus didn't scale. Linus fixed said scaling problem by getting help on filtering and pre-processing, reducing the amount of work he had to do. Ergo, all Zack needs is volunteers who can filter stuff into an "important", an "interesting" and a "junk" category. Zack can then spend time on the "important" stuff and if that's not meaty enough can move onto the "interesting".

Problem solved.

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[pthisis]

OK, for those who didn't get it: Windows admins and developers don't get to participate in a daily Windows "Kernel" thread. So...they avoid having to read 13 megs of stuff each week

Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives. Neither do most Linux developers in the sense that is analagous to Windows developers. The list is for people actually contributing to kernel development; people just developing software that runs on Linux don't normally read it.

There are some edge-cases of software applications that depend on kernel internals (libc is a good example), but those are analagous to interal Windows DLLs distributed with Windows.

Essentially, the people on linux-kernel are analagous to internal Microsoft developers and those few users who sign up for Microsoft beta testing/debugging. Presumably those people have mailing lists or other discussion areas to follow in the MS world.

Thanks, Zack!

[Russ Nelson]

Thanks, Zack, for having done them for so long. I did the kernel change summaries for a year and a half, and it's a HUGE amount of work. I appreciate what you've done perhaps more than anyone.
-russ

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[mlheur]

That's the stupidest thing I've ever read. And I read Slashdot on a regular basis.

I have to use that one sometime.
Thanks for the laugh.

Re:Why is this news?

[slashdot_commentator]

Its not over a year. Its been since November of last year.

But I can't really understand why its being posted here *now*. As other people mentioned, he put up his hiatus notice at least two weeks ago, after not having updated the website for 3 months. Apparently, no reader or Slashdot editor depends on Kernel Traffic summaries much. So, why is it news here?

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[otis wildflower]

Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives.

Just the ones that want to know which kernel version supports Solaris NFSv3 ACLs, or any number of niggling operational problems encountered while running Linux.

A Linux admin who isn't somewhat familiar with lkml (even via just KT or thru searching archives) is not much of a Linux admin. If anything, it's terribly useful to have a headsup on changes that could affect production systems (like devfs->udev, NPTL vs. Java, etc) even between patchlevels let alone minor version changes..

Re:And people wonder why there's a market for Wind

[slashdot_commentator]

Most Linux admins don't read the linux-kernel archives.

I did. Specifically because I didn't want to subscribe to the lklm mailing list. I'm not a kernel developer, so there was no need for me to keep up with every person kicking in their $0.02 on some obscure issue. BUT I really appreciated the summaries because Zack gave a quick blurb of what was going on over there in kernelland. It allowed me to gauge matters like "when to move to a new kernel?". Or if there was a problem with a kernel feature, whether it was SATA, SCSI, or whatever.

Kerneltrap is a poor substitute. I will miss the summaries.

If he has a couch to crash on

[Omaze]

and a high speed connection I'll be more than happy to help him out.

Amen

[h2odragon]

It was a great resource, and will continue to be valuable for historic perspective. I really wish i'd been able to send him some money...

there is an alternative

[flok]

For those who miss kerneltraffic, there is an alternative: LWN. It also has a summary of what happended on LKML.