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

[Shachar Shemesh]

If I'm summarizing your argument correctly, you are saying that mailing 
list discussions should ALWAYS be public, no matter what. That it is the 
mailing list that I'm conversing with, and not the individuals who 
participate in the mailing list thread.

It is an interesting notion. One I totally and utterly disagree with. 
When I reply to your email I am replying to YOUR email. It is not the 
"mailing list", an abstract being with no intelligence, that I am 
conversing with. It is Oleg Goldshmidt. If you will please read your own 
email, it is not addressing my email in the third person. It addresses 
it in the second person. Even your email is written to Shachar Shemesh, 
while keeping in mind that the entire list reads it. It is not written 
to the list, hoping that Shachar will read it. When you write:


> This has been the semantics of group communication since before
> email (surely you remember Usenet that never tolerated requests for
> private responses).
>
>   
You do not seriously think that the list has been around when Usenet was 
common, nor even that the majority of this list's subscribers were. You 
think that I, Shachar, have been.

To me, this pretty much pulls the rug from under your reasoning. If I 
need to answer you in private (say, because what I have to say is based 
on my personal knowledge of you, and is too personal for the entire list 
to know), then that very same use of the second person in the email will 
make the "forward" button a non-intuitive option for me. If what I have 
to say is personal, but not based on prior knowledge (for example, I 
know you offended another list member by bringing up a sensitive 
subject, and I don't want to offend her myself), I might not even have 
your email address in my address book.

Either way, the "forward" button is not a replacement to the "reply" 
button. The second is simply a matter of hitting "reply" and writing 
your email, the first requires putting in an email address, which has to 
be figured out.

And, like I said in my previous email, if I get it wrong, the failure is 
catastrophic. It means a personal detail has been exposed on a public 
list, or I ended up insulting someone's sensitivities twice. These are 
actions that cannot be undone by any technical means that I know of.

So, no, I don't think you adequately (at least, not to my satisfaction) 
answered my counter points.

Shachar