Re: ignoring the CoC in regards to cc:s (Re: Can we ship sources of a PDF file in the Debian diff?

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Frank Lin PIAT <fpiat@klabs.be> writes:

> The whole m-l / CoC problem comes from the assumption that all MUAs
> have advanced features, that are properly configured, and end-user
> have good understanding of what to do.
>
> If we can't achieve a reasonable behavior using Joe User's
> two-buttons-MUA, then it's guaranteed that this discussion will come
> over again and again.

I agree.

Being able to send private replies is part of reasonable behavior.  A
system that makes private replies difficult is not reasonable, IMO.

> Note that at the moment, my MUA (Evolution) has three buttons. None
> behave "correctly" for mailing lists:
> Reply = Reply to sender only
> Reply to all = reply to all previous sender and recipients
> Reply to list = Reply to list only, dropping non-subscribed sender.
>
> Any improved proposal ? or Do we have to change the policy?

Personally, I'm fine with giving up on the no-cc policy.  Just about
every other technical mailing list that I read tends to accumulate cc's
until someone gets around to removing them, and mostly people just deal
with a bit of grumbling.  I think it's fine to encourage people to trim
useless cc's when they know the person to whom they're replying is on
the list, but in terms of the available options and what we can make
people's clients do by default, I think getting an extra copy of mail
occasionally is the least bad outcome.  Currently, I think we go through
too much emotional effort towards getting people to get rid of the cc's,
with neither a lot of productive outcome nor a lot of potential for
long-term improvement.  I bet we could do as well on elimination of cc's
with a request (rather than a policy) and some pointers to configuration
for common MUAs.

In my opinion, an occasional extra copy is significantly superior to
making private replies difficult or impossible or dropping the copy of
the message that contains the List-* headers.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>