Re: bincancels in linux.kernel

[Rene Herman <rene.herman@keyaccess.nl>]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 02:49, Andrew Gierth wrote:

> I don't personally consider that the fact that a group is gatewayed
> from a mailing list to be significant when deciding how to apply Usenet
> policies to it.

Andrew, please note that I as a user of linux.kernel do actually consider it 
significant. LKML (the gated list) is not part of Usenet and the mere fact 
that at some point it is gated to a newsgroup and transported further via 
NNTP doesn't make it a part. It's merely a service to people (like me) who 
find a news interface more convenient and/or have trouble dealing with the 
large volume of messages via mail.

Furthermore (or "that aside", if you want ... ), although I guess I could 
conceivably be sympathetic to your cause of ridding Usenet from as much 
in-appropriate content as possible, linux kernel patches, including binary 
encoded ones, are not in fact in-appropriate content for linux.kernel, either 
the list or the newsgroup.

Even on the mailing-list plain text patches are preffered, but when the patch 
is large gzipping it is actually recommended:

http://www.tux.org/lkml/#s4-1

You for example today cancelled a completely appropriate post from Art Haas 
(http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0212.0/0302.html) and I will 
admit that actually annoys me quite a bit.

>  Erik> The gated list is linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org (Cc), a list to
>  Erik> which sometimes binary patches are posted.  IMHO binaries are
>  Erik> acceptable in linux.kernel.
>
> well, I would have to disagree (even if you don't think that binaries
> coming via the mailing list would be a problem, there is still the
> question of binaries posted via news

Fortunately, linux-kernel (the list) has active filtering itself, so anything 
in-appropriate comming in through news will be filtered out in the same way 
as the ones comming in through mail. Of course that doesn't help us NNTP 
readers, but I guess we'll just have to deal with that. LKML is not strictly 
non-binary-only, so cancelling simply on the criterium of binary attachments 
is very inappropriate.

Might I therefore respectfully suggest you keep the bin-cancelling suspended?

Rene.

P.S. offline for a while, so will not be able to reply quickly.