On 24/10/2020 00.58, Michal Kubecek wrote:
On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 08:10:23PM +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2020-10-22 a las 18:42 +0200, Michal Kubecek escribió:
The standard is to reply both to author and the list - or, more precisely, to everyone involved so far, i.e what "group reply" or similar does. Replying _only_ into the list makes sense for huge flames, not for technical discussion.
I don't see the relationship, sorry.
For huge non-technical discussions taking place within one list, there is little harm having whole discussion only within that list (but there is no harm following the standard procedure either). For technical discussions, e.g. issue reports, technical questions or proposed patches, your (and, most unfortunately, official openSUSE) practice of replying only "to the list" has severe drawbacks:
- people not subscribed to the list do not get replies at all - for mails sent into two (or more) lists, part of the discussion is only in one of them, part only in the other; people subscribed only to one of the lists see only a random selection of the discussion; those subscribed to both need to go through the tree twice
And, yes, the official openSUSE "netiquette" of not "cross-posting" is also fundamentally flawed.
For an illustrative example, take recent discussion about kernel upgrade to 5.9 which started with a heads up sent to opensuse-kernel and opensuse-factory. This was the best course of action as the topic belongs to both and there are people subscribed to any of the lists who are not subscribed to the other. If Jiří followed the official recommendation and sent his heads up mail only to one of the lists, people subscribed only to one of them would not receive the heads up warning at all. Do you really believe it would be better? I don't.
And if you look at the discussions in both lists, you can also see an example of why replying "only to _the_ list" is wrong: each of the two lists now contains only a random subset of the discussion. People subscribed only to one of the lists won't see big part of the discussion at all. Is it desirable? I don't think so.
I see your point, thanks. No one explained this to me in many years, so thank you again.
As a contrast, look at kernel developer mailing lists as an example of mailing list culture which actually works. You don't have to subscribe to a specific mailing list for an area you do not work regularly in just to be able to ask a question, report an issue or submit a patch. You just send it (also) there and you don't have to worry about not getting replies because people (with rare exceptions) will use "group reply" properly. And it does not really matter whether I read the discussion in my inbox or any of the list folders because all replies (again, with rare exceptions) will be in all of them.
But people that don't belong to the group, specially those reading the mail archive later, will not see all the answers if some of the answers were direct and not to the list (like those done by non-subscribers on a list that rejects non-subscriber posts).
Michal Kubeček
-- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.1 x86_64 at Telcontar)