Kernel development is truly impossible to keep track of. The main mailing list alone is vast beyond belief. Then there are all the side lists and IRC channels, not to mention all the corporate mailing lists dedicated to kernel development that never see the light of day. In some ways, kernel development has become fundamentally mysterious.
Once in a while, some lunatic decides to try to reach back into the past and study as much of the corpus of kernel discussion as he or she can find. One such person is Joey Pabalinas, who recently wanted to gather everything together in Maildir format, so he could do searches, calculate statistics, generate pseudo-hacker AI bots and whatnot.
He couldn’t find any existing giant corpus, so he tried to create his own by piecing together mail archived on various sites. It turned out to be more than a million separate files, which was too much to host on either GitHub or GitLab.
Read more at Linux Journal
