Firstly, with no explicit Reply-To address, most mail clients default to replying to the sender of the message. This means that, for people who use such clients must manually replace the To: address in their reply composition. Unfortunately, there have been prior instances of a dev accidentally replying to the -core list on -dev. This means that the conversation intended to stay private and internal to Gentoo suddenly is in the public eye and many archives. This will inevitably occur if such behavior is not resolved. Secondly, every other Gentoo mailing list that I am subscribed to (g-dev, g-devrel, g-gwn) adds a Reply-To header which instructs the dev's MUA to default to replying to the list address, rather than to the individual sender of the message to which they reply. Unfortunately, gentoo-core is the only list which does not follow this behavior. I urge infra to make this beavhior consistent across all mailing lists: Forcibly add this header to gentoo-core, or remove it from the other mailing lists' configurations. Thanks.
First off, I agree with you in principal. Our mailing lists should be consistent. My inclination, ignoring external influences for a moment, would be to add the Reply-To headers to -core and make everything the same. That said, I can't ignore external influences -- gentoo-core has been that way for a long, long time. Back, in fact, before I even joined Gentoo. There have been countless flamewars over it, similar to the one you started on -core just recently. :) I'm going to close this as WONTFIX and here's my thought process explaining why: 1) Most people are used to the way things work currently. It has been in place for a long time. 2) Most mail clients have functionality that obviates the need for Reply-To headers. 3) Devs who object either to having or not having Reply-To headers can fairly easily change things to suit their own personal tastes via maildrop and/or procmail, both of which are available on woodpecker. 4) Most importantly, no matter what we do (or don't do), someone will be unhappy with the decision. I realize you (and others) may disagree with this decision and I also realize you could come up with some compelling arguments to the points I made above. At some point, however, a decision has to be made and that's what I'm doing here. --kurt
While I disagree with the decision you made, klieber, I thank you for your explanation of the reasonings behind it; and will make do with a procmail rule to add that myself. Thanks!
