On May 27, 2014, at 10:50 AM, "Edward Ned Harvey (blu)" <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> I'm not really sure where this thread got to - I got lost in things that 
> sounded like people philosophizing on the way things should be, without tying 
> it back to the real world.


I've mostly avoided commenting on this, because the reply-to flame war is one 
of those recurring disputes that flares up periodically and accomplishes 
nothing. 

When I first set up the lists, almost 20 years ago, I set the reply-to to the 
list address, which was the common practice at the time. The first time this 
argument came up, I was persuaded by the paper "Reply-To Considered Harmful", 
and I changed the list config based on that. 

The next time the argument flared up, I came to realize that both sides had 
compelling arguments, the people who seemed to care about the issue were a very 
small fraction of the community, and the numbers of such people on each side of 
the argument seemed to be about the same. 

Somebody suggested voting on the issue, and it was clear that if we did this, 
we'd be voting on it every time the argument recurred, with the result that the 
list's behavior would be arbitrarily changed periodically. 

I decided that changing the list behavior back and forth arbitrarily would be 
far more disruptive than the consequences of either setting. 

That was probably about 10-15 years ago. 

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