Hi Werner,
I mean a list where ordinary members only receive e-mails, without
being able to post.
No automated way to do that presently exists.
Commit messages should be sent as if From: the person who does the
commit. That's a good thing. But it means that if a person who does a
commit later erroneously sends a real message, it will go through. The
alternative is to manually approve every single message sent to the
list, clearly infeasible and undesirable.
As for people who have never made a commit, their first message will be
held for moderation as a matter of course, whether they are members of
the list or not. So the moderators of the list -- you and us,
apparently -- will see it. The question is, what should the moderators
do? They could reject the message with a handwritten note saying
"please resend to xx", but that gets to be rather a drag, and creates a
special case. Silent discard is not desirable. Approval is the
simplest way forward.
So ... do you track mailman notices for your lists, i.e., look at
messages held for approval? If you want to do that, and reject
non-commit messages, that's totally fine, of course. If you want us to
look at the list to approve the real (commit) messages, we'd rather not,
though I suppose it's possible. It won't solve the case above.
One thing that can be done is to set the reply_to_address field on
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/admin/freetype-commit/general so that
replies will, at least in some cases, go somewhere other than the list,
which is the most common problem I've seen. Of course plenty of MUAs
these are too "smart" to pay attention to Reply-To:, but it might help
on occasion.
In practice, just about all commit lists I've seen have an occasional
non-commit message being sent. Life goes on ... --karl
