[lug] Re: More on Reply-To

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Sean" == Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> writes:

Sean> In the end, by personal observation, I've found that setting a
Sean> list to not be reply-to-list does *NOT* prevent people from
Sean> making the mistake of replying publicly to something they want
Sean> to reply to privately.  They're just so used to doing a group
Sean> reply that it loses it's power...

Every MUA/NUA I use has two keys for responses:  "R"eply and
"F"ollowup.  For both news and mail, they do the same thing: reply is
to author only, while followup is to everyone (a.k.a. "wide reply").

My complaint with the reply-to munging is that it breaks this, and
there is no automatic way to do *just* a private reply.  And private
replies do have a place on this list -- the reason I started this
thread here on BLUG was because I sent Kevin a small, informal
correction to his announcement.  I didn't even think about checking
the headers: I knew I wanted a private reply, so I pressed the key for
"private reply".

Sean> "Not your way" is not "the wrong way".  

I find it interesting that neither of the two busiest lists I'm on
(linux-kernel and gcc) use reply-to munging.  Maybe it's because
they're so busy, maybe because they're not "community support" lists.

Sean> It's been kind of amusing that the "don't change reply-to"
Sean> people can't conceive that people would like things any other
Sean> way.

I can conceive it, easily.  I just don't think it's the best choice.
You know me well enough that I understand situations where reasonable
people can disagree for taste reasons (even if prefering python over
perl is Wrong).  This is a case where the choice made is reducing
functionality for some people with properly-functioning MUAs, and
occasionally removing information irretrievably. 

So I feel it's wrong for "rational" reasons.  But, as people will no
doubt point out, I'm not very cooperative in general, so your argument
that it keeps discussions on-list for everyone to learn from isn't a
strong one to me.

Although I suspect that my setup predisposes me to occasionally err on
the side of sending e-mail only to the originator of the message, and
not to the group -- since I read my mailing-list traffic independently
of my "normal mail", I tend to notice when a post hasn't made it out,
and I can resend it properly.

*shrug*.  Thanks to the gnus setting that someone pointed out, I think
I'm back to the behavior I like.

t.