Re: Suggested change to tee manpage to show usefulness

[The Wanderer]

mwoehlke wrote:

> Jim Meyering wrote:
>
> > The Wanderer <address@hidden> wrote:

> > > I appreciate the attitude, but frankly, I doubt it. The policy to
> > > which I object is the practice of not automatically directing
> > > replies to list messages back to the list - that is, the practice
> > > of not putting the list address in the Reply-To header.
> >
> > Oh, *that*.
> > Even if I wanted to change that setting, I'm pretty sure that doing
> > so would cause more problems than it would solve.

I suspected as much. In that case, you might consider my original
suggestion.

(I'm not entirely certain what problems those might be, but I'm not here
to argue with you about it, aggravating though I might find the matter.)

> FWIW, I'm subscribed to lists on four "groups",

Likewise FWIW, I am presently subscribed to remotely-active discussion
lists from three contexts (bug-coreutils, the FFML, and the numerous
MPlayer and FFmpeg lists), and have been subscribed to many others in
the past; only two that I recall, bug-coreutils and the FFML, do and/or
did not set the Reply-To header. In every case I've seen, private
replies which should have been sent to the list are A) apparently not
desired and B) not uncommon. The only apparent reason for not setting
the default to reply back to the list is adherence to the principle
outlined in the documents I mentioned, which seems to me to have very
little if any benefit.

> and only KDE appears to override 'Reply-To:'

If you actually read my previous post, I was not suggesting overriding
Reply-To - "override" to me implies negating anything which may have
been there in the first place. As I said, this is the only one of the
arguments in the standard "reasons not to set Reply-To" documents which
I find at all persuasive, and there are at least two alternative
possibilities (which I noted) which seem to make more sense than
refusing to direct replies to the list under any circumstances.

> (but I guess that means that there is precedent).

For precedent as far as directing replies to posts on a discussion forum
back to that forum goes, I point you to Usenet. (Indeed, one of the
first discussion lists I ever joined had moved to mail from a newsgroup
which was being flooded under with spam.) Whether a particular
discussion forum is provided via mail or in some other way has
absolutely no bearing on the matter.

> If you really can't deal with *this* list not doing so, then I
> suggest news.gmane.org.

...now that I've looked at that closely enough to see that it might be
more than a Web-forum-style interface to mailing lists: that may be a
good suggestion. I'm not going to do it, for a number of more or less
silly reasons, but I appreciate the idea.


Much though I might like to continue to discuss this, almost all of the
directions which a further reply might take it are entirely offtopic
rather than just mostly so, so it is unlikely that I will make any
further posts in this subthread. (I might be willing to discuss the
matter privately if anyone is that interested, but one-on-one
conversation with people who are no better positioned than I am to do
anything about the problem do not seem likely to be particularly
productive.)

--
      The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.