On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: >category. Munging the RT violates the Principle of Least Astonishment rather >thoroughly, so even if it's a miswart, it's still worthy to be pointed out.
Personally, not that it matters at all in any way, but I prefer lists that do Reply-to pointing back to the list. I wont go into my reasons, as they're identical to the reasoning of everyone else who prefers it this way. The bare fact is, that reply-to munging flamewar threads have occured on mailing lists since the first days that reply-to munging started happening. I must have been on at least 200 if not 500 mailing lists which have had this exact same flamewar, and not just once, but several times a year/month, and it creeps back up again occasionally. Not just on lists like this one which set Reply-to to the list, but also on lists that *dont*, where people are arguing that the list *should*. Regardless of what *any* one person or 500 people think, this is a completely preferential and controversial issue. As controversial as abortion, capital punishment, vi vs. emacs, or whatever your favourite 50/50 split flamewar is. The bottom line, is that 50/50 split flamewars (or any ratio from about 40/60 to 60/40 or so) end up almost always in the end, or at least 99.9% of the time ending with no list change occuring. Changing behaviour pisses off more people than it pleases, in particular if a list has had a certain behaviour for a long time. As such, it is extremely pointless to demand that a given list should change it's policy on this issue, regardless of what datapoints you'd like to raise. You won't raise even a single datapoint that the list maintainers, and the majority of subscribers are not already fully 100% aware of. They just disagree with you, and are not likely to change their line of thinking no matter how much you disagree or how big of a flamewar you'd like to make about it. The best you can do, is agree to disagree and then move on to another topic - or unsubscribe. Regardless of how a particular mailing list is ran with respect to Reply-To, _anyone_ who is bothered by a given list's policy, can easily change it on their end to suit their own preference. If you prefer Reply-To to point back to the mailing list, but the list does not do that, a simple procmail filter which moves any existing Reply-To to Cc, and puts the list address from From: or another header into the Reply-To will accomplish that (that's what I do). If you prefer Reply-To: never replying to the list, then have procmail strip out the Reply-To: header, and optionally munge From: or CC: to Reply-To to simulate putting it back. One thing is fairly certain however - you are very unlikely to to change long term list policies/preferences to your way of doing things via flamewar, and not likely via any other mechanism, so just deal with it, or unsubscribe. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
