The Eudyptula Challenge was my first exposure to git-send-email. My first email was rejected due to the attachment being base64 encoded, I think. This is how I know setting up Mutt with GMail is fairly painful.

I kinda get why LKML pushes away drive by contributions - if the quality of the patch is low it can cause problems for maintainers and subsystem maintainers. The kernel has stuff like checkpatch.pl to help though. If you're contributing to the kernel you should probably be able to run a Perl script.