On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 08:18:14PM -0600, Joseph A Nagy Jr wrote:
Dave Sherohman wrote:
I disagree. Replies should go where the person sending the reply wants them to go, with consideration for any request which may be made by the poster of the message being replied to. Say, for
I disagree to the first and agree with the latter. First, part of the OSS movement (as I see it) is the sharing of knowledge. What good is a mailing list if knowledge isn't shared with the community.
An offlist reply does not necessarily mean that knowledge isn't being shared. I've already given two examples of this: Comments on a poster's .sig and organizing a side project which is not directly
I talked about that later on in my previous response.
related to the list. Not all replies to list messages are relevant to the list. I've even observed a handful of mildly embarrassing incidents where personal replies were unintentionally sent to lists.
I agree. I've done that myself several times.
Then there is also the time-honored usenet practice of requesting that all replies be directed to the original poster, who will then post a summary of the replies at a later date.
I'd rather have a discussion go on about the different methods so I can choose one or two (or more) methods to follow (in whatever order I choose) and post follow ups (with problems I encoutner) as I go along.
If you're like me, you delete all discussions except the ones you are truly interested in. This where the beautfy of mailing-list archives come in. Someone's bound to remember that a similar problem happened some time ago and can tell you so.
No argument there. I just trust people to be able to judge for themselves which responses should be public and which should be private. It appears that you do not.
Some people feel that they should be the only one's to know the solution to their problem. They are entitled to that.
If they don't like the mailing list, there is always irc.debian.org #debian
instance, that you wanted to complain about my .sig - it may be a reply to a list posting, but it's completely off-topic and absolutely does not belong on the list.
Secondly, I know how to copy someone's email (even if it means writing it down with pencil and paper) and composing an email directly to you. Those who don't are either stupid or lazy (or perhaps both).
Don't forget that what I'm calling a Bad Idea here is the suggestion that the list manager remove sender addresses from list messages. If it does so, you can't copy someone's email address and send a direct reply because it is no longer present to be copied.
Again, if you want a private reply, set your reply-to for your email addy. I'm sure you can remove the sender without touching the reply-to.
Also, disallow non-subscribers from posting.
Again, I disagree. People who have problems with their debian systems should be able to obtain help without subjecting themselves to the hundreds of messages per day which are generated by this list.
There is the digested version of this mailing list, and I'm sure you could elect to totally not receive mail at all. I'm sure this would be an easy feature to implement, if I knew how to code I'd help with such a project.
Digests reduce the number of messages received, but do not make it any easier to find the one or two replies to your question that may or may not exist within the hundreds of total posts to the list. (Actually, I suspect they would make it harder, since threading generally does not work with digests.)
I wouldn't know as I don't ever subscribe to digests.
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