The Wanderer wrote: > (And yet again. Not that it did a lot of good last time; I *still* got > an incorrect private reply, in addition to the public one.
Even though it is not an official standard the best ad-hoc standard is to set "Mail-Followup-To: " to instruct mailers where to send followup messages. It would be beneficial if you added that header to your mail messages because then mailers could do the right thing automatically. I saw that you had set Reply-To: back to the mailing list and I do not know why that reply message did not respect your reply-to header. For what it is worth I think it should have done so. > Is there any particular reason why you ignored my explicit request > to not get both responses?) First let me say thanks for being so understanding of the time and energy that volunteers and maintainers devote to this project. We make a lot more forward progress when we work together instead of fighting among ourselves. And now a few words about the GNU bug reporting mailing lists... The GNU bug mailing lists are open and there is no expectation that bug reporters are subscribed in order to post bug reports. This makes bug reporting mailing lists fundamentally different than discussion mailing lists where everyone is expected to be subscribed. In a discussion mailing list always sending to the mailing list is usual and private replies done when purposefully taking discussion off of the public list. But in a bug reporting mailing list where bug reporters usually report bugs without being subscribed then it is usual to followup both to the mailing list and to the original sender. A problem that I frequently see is that a bug reporter will post a problem to a bug reporting mailing list. I can verify that the poster is not subscribed and no indication was made that they read the mailing lists through any other interface. Someone takes the time to post a nicely worded reply that exactly addresses their issue but sends it only to the mailing list. Now I am in a quandary. I know with a high degree of confidence that the original poster did not see any response to their bug. As far as they are concerned their bug went into a black hole. That is bad. How should I respond? Should I forward the discussion to the original poster and also to the mailing list so that the action is coordinated with the group and someone else does not do the same thing again? Do I just replicate the discussion in my own words and act as if I did not see it and simply respond to the original poster? There is no easy solution in that case. Better if the original bug reporter can get the responses directly. The guideline I use for initial responses is to group reply so that messages go to both the original poster and to the bug list. This is almost always the best general course of action. Anything other than this would require additional information and resources. Then on subsequent messages I trim off all addresses except the bug list and the initial bug reporter. The responders obviously were subscribed in order to have read and responded to the message and only the original poster is unknown whether they are subscribed or not. (Unless the original poster included a Mail-Followup-To: header and if so then the mail client will respect it and do what it instructs, usually directly back to the mailing list, in which case I have nothing to trim.) If I happen to recognize that the poster is subscribed then I trim off that address from the response as well. But I think this can at best be viewed as an extra-credit and opportunistic nicety. It definitely takes more time and effort and particularly for busy maintainers I would rather see them devote their energy to working on the project code rather than spending a large amount of time on mailing list niceties. If we can help them out a little here then everyone wins. Bob
