Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>]

On Sun, 2021-04-18 at 09:10 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

Sorry for prolonging this thread-of-doom; I'm loathe to reply to Eric
because I worry that it will encourage him.  I wrote a long rebuttal to
his last email to me about his great insights into the minds of women
but didn't send it in the hope of reducing the temperature of the
conversation.

That said...

> Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > This conversation has moved well off-topic for the GCC mailing lists.
> > 
> > Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
> > Guidelines
> > (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).
> > 
> > I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off
> > the
> > GCC mailing list.
> > 
> > Thanks.
> > 
> > Ian
> 
> Welcome to the consequences of abandoning "You shall judge by the code
> alone."
> 
> This is what it will be like, *forever*, until you reassert that norm.

Or we could ignore the false dilemma that Eric is asserting, and
instead moderate the list, or even just moderate those who have never
contributed to GCC but persist in emailing the list.

Personally, I've been moving all posts by Christopher Dimech to this
list direct from my inbox to my archive without reading them for the
last several days, and it's helped my mood considerably.  He's been
prolifically posting to the list recently, but in the 8 years I've been
involved in gcc development I've never heard of him before this thing
kicked off, and the stuff I've had the misfortune to see by him appears
to me to be full of conspiracy theories and deranged raving.  The clue
might have been when he referred to us as "bitches".

"Don't feed the trolls" might have worked once, but sometimes they
start talking to each other, and it becomes difficult for a bystander
to tell that everyone else is ignoring them, and it keeps threads like
this one alive.

I reject the idea that those of us who work on GCC have to put up with
arbitrary emails from random crazies on the internet without even the
simple recourse of being able to put individuals on moderation.  That
might have worked 20 years ago when I thought ESR was relevant, but
seems absurdly out-of-date to me today.

As usual, these are my opinions only, not necessarily those of my
employer

Dave