[BusyBox] OT: mailing list setup

Ole-Egil Hvitmyren oehvitmyren at network-electronics.com
Thu Mar 17 08:56:36 UTC 2005


Rob Landley wrote:

> The purpose of a reply-to munge is to increase the number of off-topic threads 
> on the list in hopes of not missing some vitally important thing somebody 
> might accidentally say.  This never improves the signal to noise ratio, just 
> the volume of posts from people who accidentally mean to reply to the 
> individual and wind up replying to the list.  The real downside is the 
> "accident" case involves broadcasting stuff to lots of people who the message 
> was never indended to be of interest to.
> 

Incidentally(sp?) I've only ever seen ONE person do this on a list with 
lots of people and reply-to explicitly overwritten by mailman. I've seen 
the opposite case far to often, though. Resulting in more questions from 
users rather than more answers from those who know.

I've heard a gazillion reasons why reply-to-munging is useful, broken, 
dangerous etc etc. But what the people who write these things forget is 
that all lists are not the same. Even the guy who almost started crying 
when I told him I have a list where we voted over it and ended up 
munging (he considers reply-to-munging dangerous) accepts the fact that 
when using RequestTracker, reply-to explicitly goes back to RT. If it 
didn't, you would have _serious_ problems tracking what actually goes on.

> I don't believe everything I say is so vital that if I accidentally forget to 
> copy the list on some of my replies, people will be seriously deprived my 
> glowing wit and my one and only authoritative response to whatever the 
> question was.  I DO believe that if I start posting weather reports on here 
> and pictures of my cats, it would annoy people.

Surely you send so many emails to the list that putting weather reports 
and pictures of your cats into a footnote now and then would cover it 
just fine for the cat-lovers and weather-buffs here? :-P

Seriously though, yes we would be a bit deprived if you replied only to 
the person, not to the list _when you are on-topic_ (which seems to be 
all the time from where I'm sitting). This is because we value your 
input. "We" being me and all my imaginary friends with busybox tar, 
gzip, init and bzip2 problems now and then.

> 
> Why does it seem that people who are newbie enough to have a problem 
> remembering which button to press are always the ones who think all their 
> responses are so vital for everyone to hear that they shouldn't have to 
> remember to hold down the button when they want to be heard, but should have 
> a live microphone at all times?  Maybe it's just me reading too much into 
> stuff again...

On-list replies take a bit more self-asteem on the part of the submitter 
(ok, I know a few people who have this notion that their input is always 
worthy of the worlds attention, but these people would have replied to 
the list anyhoo, just to let the world know they are talking. This is a 
problem on an online forum I frequent, where a couple of people are 
CONSTANTLY giving the wrong advice, even after having been "shouted at" 
by yours truly numerous times with the subject "shut up you moron, you 
are giving bad advice" etc. No, I'm not big on courtesy when people are 
actively frelling up other peoples Linux installations). Let's just say 
that if I have a problem I would rather see 10 replies on-list (with the 
possibility to have bad advice countered by someone who knows better) 
than 1000 off-list, because if it isn't worth sending to the list, then 
maybe it isn't worth sending at all.

Of course, I'm perfectly happy with the current arrangement, because so 
far it seems that most questions actually get resolved on-list. (either 
by on-list replies or by the original poster replying to himself with 
the solution to clean up the archiving)

I just wanted to argue that reply-to-munging isn't ALWAYS bad. It 
depends. On factors and stuff.

Ole-Egil



More information about the busybox mailing list