On kernel mailing list behavior

IF I WRITE MY REPLY IN ALL CAPS, AM I ABUSING YOU?

Yes? No?

There's a huge difference between yelling face to face and on email. The problem with text is that it's much harder to tell the degree the person is upset with you, or disagrees with you.

When Linus disagrees with me, I take his level of emotion as a gauge of how much he disagrees with me. If he says "you shouldn't do it that way", it sounds like he doesn't like it, but he doesn't really care that much about it, and may still let me do it if I really want to. If he says "Only a f*cking idiot would do it that way", it's clear that I screwed up and need to change the way it was done. It's about communication, that's all.