On kernel mailing list behavior

I don't think Linus was seriously advocating *violence*, but joking aside, he was most certainly drawing a parallel between the effects of being physically intimidating and being verbally intimidating. Remember that the whole point that kicked off the thread was telling Greg to be harsher so people would send him less mail and not try to get fixes into stable that should go into later -rc kernels.

Or, in other words, yell and rant more so people don't see you as friendly. Be intimidating.

I have the same reaction to that notion that Sarah did: seriously, is *that* how we're going to put it?

Now, the problem the original thread wanted to solve made sense: patches shouldn't go into stable in preference to later -rc kernels. However, that doesn't seem like a problem best solved via ranting and raving.

So, while I didn't take Linus's joke about Greg's size as anything but a joke, in the long-standing tradition of "ha ha only serious", I do think the parallel between physical intimidation and verbal/written intimidation was entirely serious, and I think *that's* what made Sarah's mail reasonable.