Mailing list meta-issues (was: Re: imminent release)

[Greg Earle earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US]

David Hogan writes:
> Steve Kotsopoulos <steve@ecf.toronto.edu> writes:
>> Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org> wrote:
>>> I hope "the plan 9 guys" will reject anyone who replies to the
>>> list rather then the sender.
>>
>> I hope not. The message from Rob had a 'Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu',
>> probably inserted by the list software.
> 
> Which is a bad thing for the list software to do.

No, it's a *great* thing for list software to do.

There's nothing I hate more than posting to a mailing list and then getting
back two copies of all replies, and I *especially* hate it when the replies
spiral off meta-discussions or side tangents I could care less about, but
everyone was too damned lazy to remove earlier participants from the headers.

> Not adding the Reply-To is better, because it gives the person replying the 
> choice of just replying to the author, or doing a group reply which will
> go to the list.

Anyone with decent mailer agent software can do this already by themselves.

(I heartily encourage you to try exmh 1.5.3, which offers in its "Reply" menu
 a sub-menu with a "Reply to sender" and a "Reply to all" entry.)

> Can this be changed, to forestall future debacles?

Please, leave it be.

	- Greg

P.S. As to the mailing list vs. comp.os.plan9 issue, one observation: because
     I couldn't get my Caltech-associated Prof (who works here at JPL) to fill
     out the damned paperwork, I'm running NetBSD/SPARC on my IPC instead of
     Plan 9.  NetBSD suffers from having a zillion mailing lists, and before
     recently, essentially non-existant newsgroup support.  I'd suggest getting
     either a strong comp.os.plan9 newsgroup proposal going, or keep it to a
     mailing list if the target audience isn't too high.  Just please don't
     set up a zillion different little mailing lists like NetBSD did.  Yuck.