From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S271240AbTHCSs1 (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2003 14:48:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S271239AbTHCSs1 (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2003 14:48:27 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:63913 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S271293AbTHCSbZ (ORCPT ); Sun, 3 Aug 2003 14:31:25 -0400 Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2003 11:30:50 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: hp cc: linux-assembly@vger.kernel.org, Kernel Mailing List , "David S. Miller" Subject: Re: your mail In-Reply-To: <200308031136.17768.lx@lxhp.in-berlin.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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