Re: Code of Conduct on the Debian mailinglists
On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 10:24:10PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> > You know, I use a mail program. Replying to people is in my fingers as
> > "hitting a button". A very specific button, especially for that purpose.
> > I expect my MUA to Do The Right Thing (TM). It usually does, except on
> > the Debian mailinglists, where people start whining to me about some
> > silly CoC.
>
> If your mailer makes you automatically go shouting on the push of a
> button, it may be time to download the source and get some serious
> hacking done.
The mailer is doing the right thing. Sending a CC isn't a "shout".
The sender isn't. If the sender doesn't want CCs, it's fully within the
sender's power to specify that in the list headers. Most senders on
this list that don't want CCs do that.
I am on dozens of mailing lists. There are thousands of participants on
this list alone. I subscribe to, and leave, mailing lists all the time.
Why should a person with a personal preference expect me to shoulder the
burden of maintaining a mental list of that, when it's within his power
to express his preference in a way that mail readers understand
automatically?
The same goes for the Debian CoC. I agree with Wouter on this. The CoC
is at odds with the desires expressed in the mail headers.
Reply-To has been around since at least RFC822 (1982), and the person
that wants to avoid personal CCs could use it. It is standard and it is
widely supported.
There are, of course, problems with it. Mail-Followup-To is also a
defacto standard (note that RFC is not the only way for a standard to
occur; HTML, for instance, was a standard long before it got an RFC).
Many mail clients do the right thing when they see it, and that is
especially true here.
If the person with the complaint had used this, he would have been fine.
Remember the old FidoNet mantra? "Don't be excessively annoying, and
don't be easily annoyed." If he was bothered so much by the CCs, he
should have added the Mail-Followup-To header to his messages rather
than getting excessively annoyed about it.
It's a personal preference thing, and since it is trivially accomodated
on his end, why should thousands of people try to remember that this
person on this list doesn't want CC's?
> The person I was replying to chooses to ignore the request of the OP and
> even meets his request with hostility (shouting). Then in my opinion
> you've reached the limit of acceptable behaviour on this mailinglist.
I did not *choose to ignore* it. I didn't even see it until his latest
message, and I meant not to CC him there but accidentally did anyway due
to force of habit.
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