Stephen P. Becker posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:18:31 -0500:
> The point is, you need to stop polluting this list with completely > off-topic sub-rants which have nothing to do with gentoo development. > You do a very good job at killing useful threads with your essays on > world peace. It's not entirely off topic, as it pertains to dev/user relations. Note that I didn't go into detail originally, until asked to clarify, which I did. That's not off topic, that's supplying logical support for an on-topic answer to an on-topic, even "useful", question. You don't have to agree with my particular viewpoint on "world peace", to see how my answer related to the topic at hand. In any case, it's certainly more on topic than references to goats and the like. Yes, I understand the joking and etc in the context of welcoming a new dev and yes, I consider it reasonably appropriate, precisely on topic or not. That's not the point. It can't however be reasonably argued that such comments are any closer to on topic than mine are, yet the same folks that complain about my comments don't emit a peep when these farther from topic comments come up. Where's the consistency? Having no rule that can be applied to all cases with consistent results, how am I to know when I'm breaking the rule? I can't. It's therefore impossible to comply, because the rule appears to be arbitrary, with no consistent application possible. If a consistent rule exists, make it known, and perhaps the results will be more agreeable. Also... how can I kill a useful thread of tens or hundreds of posts from multiple posters, with a single "essay on world peace"? Am I making the posting choices for the other participants? Hardly. How then can it be possible for me to kill the thread, when it's always possible to ignore my "essay" and the resulting subthread, if desired, and continue posting away on the more "useful" subthreads, as if I'd never posted in the first place. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
