[Pkg-mutt-maintainers] mutt-1.6.2, or neomutt?

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

Hi Antonio, Faidon, and Christoph,

Thank you all for taking the time to reply and address my concerns (and
feelings).  From all your responses, I think there is a path forward
that can make us both happy and lead to better cooperation between us.

I don't think there is necessarily a need to block or roll-back the
current unstable 1.6.2-1.  It would be nice if the three commits I
mentioned before could be added to a 1.6.2-2 release, if that's not a
lot of work (not sure if they apply cleanly).  Alternatively, I will be
releasing 1.7.0 in about 2-3 weeks.

On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 09:36:53AM +0000, Antonio Radici wrote:
> If the problem is that neomutt was merged as a single patch we can work with the
> neomutt maintainer and fix that and maybe have it in separate patches.
> 
> The removal of the mutt-patched binary was something that I approve because it
> ease the mainteinace burden on our side, at the same time I understand your
> concerns of having a single patch that completely modifies the way mutt behaves
> adding a lot of lines of code.

This is definitely in your purview, but I personally would feel better
to see the patches separated.  At the least, it gives me something to
look at and evaluate applying individually.

A concern I have is that it feels like NeoMutt has taken about _every_
patch out there and merged it.  Perhaps some of them should have been
merged a long time ago, but I'm concerned others shouldn't have been
(and should not be).  I'm also concerned that once exposed to Debian
users, some may turn into another "nntp patch" that can never be taken
away.  So this is yet another reason I'd feel better if you had them
broken down and knew exactly what features you were adding.

On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 03:37:21PM +0300, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> My personal PoV (and YMMV) is that there is a middle ground to be found
> here. I applaud your efforts to have a clean codebase and maintain a a
> good quality product, but on the other hand there are patches out there
> that have been battle-tested by hundreds of users (Debian or otherwise)
> for the better part of a decade (e.g. compressed folders?). Merging at
> least some of them and cleaning them up in later releases could
> potentially be an alternative strategy you could pursue. Just my 2 cents
> though :)

I agree.  In fact, one thing I could really use help with is
prioritizing patches and forwarded tickets.

The compressed folders patch is high on my list, but I'd really like to
hear from you what priority you consider other patches to be.

The same with tickets.  I've tried to go through them, but with 570 open
tickets it's really hard to know where to start sometimes.  If there are
pain points you know about, pinging a ticket would help put it on my
radar.

On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 03:10:59PM +0200, Christoph Berg wrote:
> On the social (or operational) level I'd like to say that from my view
> the current situation should be seen as an intermediate step. Mutt
> development had been stalled for almost 10 years, and Debian had
> accumulated a gigantic number of patches. Then Neomutt came around,
> offering a ready-made basis to build on, so we gladly accepted. Of
> course the goal is to get all these integrated into Mutt, but at least
> from my side, the old habit of not even trying to get things merged
> into a stalled codebase had not died, even when you were working hard
> to get Mutt forward in the past years. Sometimes the clocks inside
> Debian tick very slowly. (This isn't meant to say this is good, it's
> just an explanation.)

Okay, I can understand that.  I'd very much like to hear from any of you
in mutt-dev, the ticket system, or directly.  Please be assured that I'm
listening and your input will be taken seriously.

As you decide the direction to take with the Debian package, I'd
appreciate hearing about it.

Thank you,

-Kevin
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