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Linux Software

Three-year Anniversary of Kernel Traffic 66

Posted by chrisd from the zack-brown-is-very-cool dept.
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."
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Three-year Anniversary of Kernel Traffic More

Three-year Anniversary of Kernel Traffic

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  • I'm truly glad it's there for reference. I really miss some of the sites that have been more or less lost (ie www.linuxhq.com, www.webwatcher.org,etc). Today's economy and the maintainers lack of time/interest have taken their tolls.

  • 1500+ emails a day? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @05:10PM (#2838209) Homepage Journal
    The site says that, last week, there were a little over 2700 emails total...

    - A.P.
  • How can one even HAVE a mailing list with 1500+ messages/day?

    Unless of course, you're talking about Hotmail. I don't remember signing up for any lists, but I sure do enjoy the hilarious back-and-forth conversations between the people trying to sell graphic p0rn and the people convinced that we should all be selling real estate for a profit!
    • 1400 of those messages are ESR and Alan arguing about god knows what.

    • Re:Speaking of that... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by m_ilya ( 311437 )
      How can one even HAVE a mailing list with 1500+ messages/day?

      Well, usually nobody needs to read all these emails. The trick is having good mailer which can help to sort all that email and find what you do want or need to read. It is not a problem with good mailer which supports threading and kill lists (or Scoring). I've been subscribed on a number of maillists with more than 2000+ message/day in total and I could easily read them with Gnus.

    • You're right.. At that point, wouldn't a newsgroup be more appropriate?

      On SunManagers i used to get about 100 a day on heavy days, and that was a LOT for me to handle. I ended up creating a new e-mail account specifically for mailing lists.. Between the SM list, Legato NotWorker, Veritas...

      Just a side comment: Slashdot looks *SO MUCH BETTER* in this blue color. When will we get the option to theme slashot, like other weblog engines have? :/

      • Re:Speaking of that... (Score:4, Informative)

        by dan g ( 30777 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @06:26PM (#2838663) Homepage
        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 [gnus.org] it makes the traffic all that much more manageable.


        dan.
      • On SunManagers i used to get about 100 a day on heavy days, and that was a LOT for me to handle. I ended up creating a new e-mail account specifically for mailing lists.. Between the SM list, Legato NotWorker, Veritas...

        Ontopic comment: You don't like procmail or similar?

        Just a side comment: Slashdot looks *SO MUCH BETTER* in this blue color. When will we get the option to theme slashot, like other weblog engines have? :/

        offtopic comment: Yeah I agree, specially about the customize thingie... it would really be sweet if we could design our own comments boxes with some %-variables or similar. But i dunno if slashdot could handle the extra load of that...
        colour choice i've missed for a long time though
    • How can one even HAVE a mailing list with 1500+ messages/day?
      With procmail and/or Mail::ListDetector it isn't so bad....although I wouldn't want to try it with Outlook...
  • Come on guys, they get *extra* props for having a URL like that. :)

  • Exaggeration on kernel traffic? (Score:5, Informative)

    by bconway ( 63464 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @05:16PM (#2838248) Homepage
    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.

    • Kernel Traffic is better for me (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Weird Dave ( 224717 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @05:38PM (#2838360) Homepage
      Kernel traffic is doing everybody who has limited bandwidth a favor. It increases awareness of Kernel issues, even to those who know they won't become active developers.

      The original post was obviously hyperbole, but having subscribed to the list myself, I know how quickly lkml can eat up your disk quota if you aren't vigilant.

      Zack Brown deserves props specifically for the bug reports you mentioned. If I found a kernel bug, I wouldn't have previously known how to report it, or whether it was already reported, without sifting through tons of mailing list archives.

      I read kernel traffic weekly, and I feel like the few minutes I spend reading it really keeps me on top of what's going on.

      Overall, people with a 56k modem cannot deal with lkml, and they shouldn't have to.

      • Re:Kernel Traffic is better for me (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Another option for the bandwidth-limited are the web archives [indiana.edu], 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 [fa.linux.kernel] front-end (which I think is what Linus uses), as well as a Google archive [google.com]

    • One good use of the kernel lists is to stress test your mail reader. One kernel hacker I know of posted on the LUG mailing list to say that Netscape 4 refused to read his kernel lists mailbox which was over 70MB in size.

    • Let's look at the numbers, shall we?
      Mailing List Stats For This Week
      We looked at 2507 posts in 10941K.

      AFAIK 2507/7 ~= 358

  • Great stuff (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spatrick_123 ( 459796 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @05:19PM (#2838261)
    This site is so useful not only for those of us who can't follow the huge volume of email, but also for people who either got into the game late or only read sporadically. It's sort of like jumping into a TV show in the 8th season and having a wonderful reference to give you background on the first 7. Thanks so much to everyone at kernel traffic!

  • 1500 a day! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is almost one message per minute! How do they keep up with this amount of messages? Why don't they split different issues to different lists?

  • the one where I agree (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DeadPrez ( 129998 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @05:37PM (#2838353) Homepage
    I am no kernel hacker, just a lowly information technology worker who wants to keep up-to-date on the comings and goings with Linux development. Ok, I admit it, I am just a bit of a gawker when it comes to free software development theory. I religiously read the abridged kernel traffic every Monday. That is good stuff (all nice and technical) to start the day off with. I recommend it to anyone who wants to stay hip and with it (and hey, you get to see the real Alan and real Linus every now and then).

    Keep it up guys!

  • Good starting place, but not for everyone (Score:4, Informative)

    by dan g ( 30777 ) on Monday January 14, 2002 @06:39PM (#2838727) Homepage
    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 [kernelnewbies.org] and start reading the real list. I recommend a good filternig system to help you separate out the chaff, though.

    dan.
  • Pretty cool site. Now I can use it to find out more about those brief descriptions they put in the kernel changelogs.

    --BluNereid
  • The page doesn't say when the next stable version is due out (at least, not that I can find after a quick once-over). It's been, what, three whole weeks since the last one? I'm used to the "once a week" releases.

    On the plus side, that must mean 2.4.17 is somewhat stable. :)

    -Legion

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