[Pkg-mutt-maintainers] Bug#838992: mutt: using mutt, will not default to home mail directory: "c", "?" with "set folder" remains in /var/mail

[Alberto Garcia]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 05:30:32AM +0000, Antonio Radici wrote:

> I believe I need more info on this:
> a) What directory do you expect instead?
> b) where is directory that you expect, set in .muttrc?

I'll also give my input on what changed in the folder navigation in
Mutt recently.

This particular change happened between 1.7.0-2 and 1.7.0-3, I'm not
sure if it also applies to the problems the other uses have reported:

$ mkdir -p ~/Mail/INBOX/{cur,new,tmp}
$ echo 'set spoolfile=~/Mail/INBOX/' > .muttrc

Now open mutt and press 'c' followed by '?' to list the mailboxes.

1) In previous versions of Mutt you'd see what's under ~/Mail (the
   'INBOX' directory in this case). If you select INBOX then it would
   go to the index view and open the INBOX maildir (which is empty).

   In Mutt >= 1.7.0-3 you see what's under ~/Mail/INBOX/ (that is, the
   cur, new and tmp directories internal to the maildir format). But
   you cannot do anything with those, you need to navigate to the
   parent directory and from there open INBOX.

   This is annoying but it can be fixed by removing the trailing '/'
   from the 'spoolfile' line in the .muttrc file. Still, it took me
   a while to realize that and it's very irritating when changing
   folders, so it would be nice to have it fixed in the package.

2) From the folder view, navigate to the parent directory over and over
   until you reach the root directory.

   In older versions of Mutt you simply press Enter all the time
   because '..' is highlighted by default when you change directories.

   In Mutt >= 1.7.0-3 when you move to the parent directory the cursor
   does not highlight '..', but rather the directory where you are
   coming from.

   I'm hesitant to consider this a bug, but it's certainly a change
   of behavior that is very noticeable to regular Mutt users. I'm not
   sure what the use case is, but when you want to attach a file and
   you need to browse the directory tree in order to open it I find
   the old behavior more convenient. I sometimes have to use different
   versions of Mutt in different machines so that makes things worse.

I guess these issues are due to a change in the folder browsing code
and are related to the ones originally described in this bug report,
but if you think otherwise I can report a new bug.

Thanks,

Berto