On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

I started this once.

I have (sort of) a GIT tree with all Linux revisions that I could find 
from v0.01 up to v1.0.9.  But the most interesting information and also 
what is the most time consuming is the retrieval of announcement 
messages for those releases in old mailing list or newsgroup archives to 
serve as commit log data.  It seems to be even arder to find for post 
v1.0 releases.

Yes, I agree. Google finds some of them, but (a) I was never very good 
about announcements anyway and (b) there's nothing really good to search 
for, so it's very hit-and-miss.

Some of the really early release notes are easy to find, just because I 
made them available with the sources, but mostly I'd just have posten to 
the newsgroup/mailing lists.

If somebody creates a reasonably good tree (ie all the trees, easily 
diffable, tied together with at least *some* commit history and the most 
easily found release notes), I'm willing to try to spend some time just 
writing down recollections from looking at the diffs. Not very reliable, 
but better than nothing. This is the kind of thing that the "notes" thing 
could be useful for, since there are others around who might also be 
interested in adding their commentary.

		Linus