[Python-Dev] netiquette on py-dev (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 25 05:44:06 CEST 2012

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

When responding to posts, should the poster to whom I am responding be listed as well as python-dev, or should my responses just go to python-dev?

I see both ways occuring, and am not sure if one or the other is preferred.

I don't know of any webmail implementations that provide reply-to-list, so a lot of us end up using reply-to-all. Cleaning up the headers requires at least deleting the To (which is where the author ends up), and perhaps moving the list from Cc to To (to make it pretty, I don't think a nonempty To is actually required by the RFC). Especially on a mobile device this is a PITA.

So in most cases I suppose that the duplicate going to the author is just an issue of "energy conservation" on the part of the responder.

Note that people who are really annoyed by the duplicates can set their Mailman accounts to no-dupes, and Mailman won't send the post to that person. (This has its disadvantages in principle -- no List-* headers and other list-specific info -- and in implementation -- at best Mailman can change all your lists at one site, so you need to do this on every site you subscribe to. But it's an option.) This won't work for people who read on Gmane, of course, since they don't own the subscription where they're reading the list.

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