Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

Last month, as part of Google Summer of Code I worked with my student on her first submissions to QEMU. She had never seen any of "git rebase -i", "git add -p", "git format-patch", "git send-email" but she was able to learn everything in a matter of hours. The "send patches as email" part, which really is the "gigantic list of things to do before contributing" that you mention, was the least of her worries compared to actually getting the code in good shape for submission.