git and MAINTAINERS only: plot mailing lists over time

[bulwahn]

We want to know which kernel mailing lists were mentioned over the history of the kernel development.

I can think of two reasonable visualisations:

• simply show the number of lists over time
• a bar chart that shows a line for each mailing list with its known first mention and its date of removal, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States_by_court_composition.

The data is probably again a bit dirty, but probably with a bit of manual tweaking (simply ignore email addresses that are not really mailing list), we can a nice visualisation.

It is probably simple for us to go back to v2.6.12; before that it is a bit more tricky.

@rralf You know where we find the mentioning of mailing lists; let us see if others know this as well.

The next challenge would be to plot the earliest available mailing list archive data we have for each list in the same diagram.

[bulwahn]

The first task is to create a very simple prototype with bash:

For all proper kernel releases in the kernel git history, it shall create the following csv file:

version; date; number of mentioned mailing lists

When that very simple prototype is clear, implement that command in pasta and start digging into the details of refining the script to handle all the special cases that is actually required to present this data correctly.