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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."
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.
http://tumanov.com
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.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
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