[H-GEN] software runs the world

[Russell Stuart]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 19:19, Greg Black wrote:
> I disagree.  It was deliberate.  There is no default, except one
> that you set.  And the default that you set was wrong.  That's
> nobody's fault except the person who did it.

That quite a leap you made to reach that conclusion!  Its
wrong, of course.  I intended to change the default.  I just
forgot.  You seem to be saying I deliberately forgot - but 
really how could you know?  Besides you would be calling me 
a liar which is not a nice thing to do.

As it happens the default "Reply To:" is associated with the
the "From" address, which I keep the same for all Humbug
lists.  I set it to general, because that is the list I post
to most.

> No, you don't have to do it manually.  Although it's so trivial
> to do it manually that I in fact do it by hand for every message
> I send to the Humbug lists.  If it was worth automating, I would
> be one of those most likely to do it, since I am a programmer
> and doing stuff like that is second nature for me.  And you
> don't have to do it at all -- you can leave it to list members
> to do the right thing.  But, if you think it's worth automating,
> then I submit that it's worth the tiny amount of effort involved
> in automating it correctly.  Certainly, there can be no excuse
> for some stupid piece of software putting a wrong reply-to on a
> message ...

Fortunately I don't have to make an excuse for some stupid of
software because as I said, I do it manually - just like you.
I plan to automate it when I get a new laptop.  I will be
using Debian on it, with exim.  Exim makes it fairly easy to
rewrite addresses on the way through.

I did think about how I could re-write the reply to address
with my existing sendmail / Red Hat setup, but I could not 
think of way that only required the tiny amount of work 
you say it does.  Of course its is entirely possible you 
know more about Unix and programming than I do, but I have 
to balance that thought against the fact that you have not 
done it, despite programming being second nature to you.

As for leaving it to list members to do the right thing, if
I want them to reply to the list, it seems polite to make
it easy for them to do so.  Besides, I happen to regard the
not munging the reply to as harmful for the list - it 
reduces traffic when people who are as forgetful as me 
forget to change the "To:" address.  So relying on list 
members to do the right thing doesn't always work.  As it 
happens, you commented negatively at the start of this 
thread on this being one of the bad things about mailing 
lists - people replying to the wrong list.  Munging ReplyTo
automatically would eliminate that.  It would only happen
when someone deliberately wanted to cross post.

> > In fact, I am pretty sure I have seen posts here where 
> > someone has said they posted something to their blog 
> > rather than posting it here.  QED.
> 
> I recall one such post (on an extremely long and somewhat
> doubtful thread), and I recall saying that I disapproved and I
> seem to recall the person posting the essentials to the list
> after that.  And there was one other blogged response that was
> mentioned on the list.  That does not prove that the list has
> had its day.

Was someone arguing the list had had its day?  

> > Right now I think this feedback will be missing when I write
> > something and  put something up on a blog.  I guess I will
> > find out soon enough.
> 
> You will probably find that people you've never heard of (and
> probably would never have heard of if you'd restricted yourself
> to the Humbug lists) will write to you out of the blue about
> stuff you write about in your blog.  I've had emails from all
> sorts of people (some nutters, some well-known software people,
> some just interested bystanders) about a wide range of things
> that I've written about in my blog.  That has been a major
> source of surprise to me and is one of the reasons why I'll keep
> it going.
> 
> Of course, that used to happen to me when I did Usenet too, but
> that was less surprising since you knew the stuff you wrote was
> going out to a huge audience.  When I write my blog, I know that
> a few friends and family will read it -- but I keep discovering
> that other people are reading it too.  I don't read logs, so I
> only find out about this when those people are motivated to
> write to me directly.  It's been interesting.

Indeed, it you make it sound interesting.  You are making me look
forward to it.