On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, William Stein wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Tim Abbott <tabb...@mit.edu> wrote:
> > (Note that I'm not directly subscribed to this list and do not have
> > the time to read it regularly, so you may want to CC me directly if
> > you want to ensure I see your replies. I continue to wish that sage-
> > devel was managed like the LKML.)
> >
> Do tell. I don't know anything about how the Linux Kernel Mailing
> list is managed or what advantage it has over the sage-devel mailing
> list.
The issue is that Google groups automatically munges the Reply-to: header
(this may be configurable).
The LKML has really high traffic, and so a lot of people who contribute
don't directly subscribe. Instead, it's standard practice to send an
email to the LKML, and people are supposed to reply-all so that they CC
both the people who've actually contributed to the thread and the list
itself. It's policy when emailing a patch to the LKML to CC, you need to
CC the people who work on the relevant subsystem; they have a file called
MAINTAINERS in the root of the source tree that encodes this information,
and a script that will print out the list of people you're supposed to CC
based on what files your patch touches.
So, this way the guy who maintains the r8169 driver doesn't actually need
to read the entire (basically unbearable) load of the LKML; he just needs
to read the emails that CC him directly. There are still a lot of people
who subscribe to the LKML and read random emails sent to the list, but
that's not required in order to be a useful contributor or even a
subsystem maintainer.
With sage-devel, if I send an email to the list and then someone replies,
the "Reply-to: sage-devel@googlegroups.com" header guarantees their reply
will go to the list, but most mail clients will send the email to _only_
the list. Thus I end up having to periodically check back to see whether
anyone replied to threads I'm involved in.
There's a tradeoff here -- the LKML way requires teaching people to
reply-all, and that has its costs. But I always find high-traffic lists
that munge reply-to to be frustrating to contribute to without a
significant minimum time commitment to read the mailing list.
-Tim Abbott
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