The new linux-il - a few tips to get you (re)started

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz> wrote:

> They are listed at http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html, but the
> ones I mostly want answered are these two:
>
>   * With reply to set to the list, the failure mode is catastrophic,
>     while with it not, the failure mode merely means having to resend
>     a message.
>   * Sending a private message with reply to list is much much much
>     more difficult than sending a public message without it.

I presume that both bullets above refer to the same section of the
reply-to-harmful link that says, effectively, "what if I wanted to
respond to the poster of the message and not to the list and hit reply
by mistake?" This, as all of that document, misconstrues list postings
as essentially a private email with a whole bunch of people CCed along
the way. Sort of, "this posting by Shachar is an email Shachar sent to
me directly and CCed a whole bunch of others since it might be
interesting to them, too." This is how the author of that doc thinks,
and he wants the mailing list to be configured to support this
semantics.

This is not what a mailing list is. When you post a message to the
list you do *not* send it to me and a bunch of other people. You send
it to the list, and I get it from the list as the sender, and I don't
intend to reply to you and a bunch of other people but to the list
only. This has been the semantics of group communication since before
email (surely you remember Usenet that never tolerated requests for
private responses).

Whoever wants to forward a mailing list posting privately should do
just that, forward, and there is a corresponding button or command in
every MUA (your second bullet goes away). This looks infinitely more
reasonable to me than "in order to reply to the list please reply to
me and to a bunch of others, some of whom may be totally unrelated to
the list and may not want to see your response or may not allow you to
send anything to them" (there goes your first bullet, but I am
repeating myself, sorry).

As for arguments pro and contra in general, recall that there are 2
kinds of mailing lists - announcement mailing lists and discussion
mailing lists. I don't have the statistics but I suspect that the
majority of mailing lists out there are announcement ones. Those
should not have reply-to set to the list for obvious reasons.
Discussion mailing lists should. Mailman offers both options for this
reason and IIRC also makes this distinction in its documentation. [I
admit that the last time I set up a mailman list was at least a couple
of years ago and I probably didn't check the docs then since it was
the umpteenth time.] Our list is obviously a discussion one, and the
discussion we conduct is with the list. IMHO, the configuration should
support this semantics.

So, paraphrasing the famous response to a no less famous paper by
Dijkstra, "reply-to-harmful is harmful". ;-)

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | oleg at goldshmidt.org