Re: your mail

Linus Torvalds
2003-08-03T18:48:27Z

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, hp wrote:
>
> so He/You did lock me out, too?
> whithout any notice. by what reason?

Maybe because this has nothing to do with the kernel?

It's ok to discuss kernel issues on the kernel mailing list, but we've had
tons of totally off-topic flames, rants and general noise.

To the point that a lot of people don't even have time to follow
linux-kernel any more, since a lot of the discussion has nothing to do
with the technical kernel work.

Since some of these rants are started (and kept going) by people who don't
ever seem to actually get involved in _real_ kernel-related technical
discussions, David felt that one way to curb it was to just blacklist
people who repeatedly post things that aren't related to the kernel.

It's ok to be off-topic every once in a while, but it's not ok to
consistently be so.

That said, David is also not the most politic person I know, and I suspect
this could have been handled slightly more gracefully. One potential less
annoying approach is to not block posting from people, but rewrite the
subject line for such posters with a prepended "[OFF-TOPIC]", and just let
people filter those out on the receiving end. Or just automatically shunt
them off to another list.

I dunno. I don't personally much care - but I've never been the maintainer
of the mailing list, and I sure as hell don't ever want to be. Whoever is
the maintainer gets to set the rules.

Linus