[Pkg-mutt-maintainers] Bug#870635: mutt package is not using the official mutt tarball

[Kevin McCarthy]

Package: mutt
Version: 1.8.3+neomutt20170609-2
Severity: serious
Justification: Policy 2.3

Dear Maintainer,

I am the upstream project maintainer of Mutt.  Your version of the
"mutt" package in unstable and testing is based on the NeoMutt
tarball, not the official Mutt 1.8.3 release tarball.

If you wish to call your package "mutt", then you should be using the
official Mutt release tarball are your "orig" tarball for the package.
To do anything else is an unacceptable ethical and legal breach by
Debian.

You have been aware of this issue since at least June 30th, see
<https://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=149886522430053&w=2>. As Erik
Christiansen mentioned in that thread, while the GPLv2:

  "permits derivative works, it does not permit a derivative work to
   purport to be the copyrighted original work. Misrepresenting the
   "debneomutt" work as "mutt" would seem to clearly contravene the
   asserted and enforcible licence."

Even if the legal argument is not airtight, doing this is insulting
and disrepectful to the Mutt project and to me as its maintainer.

Please correct this issue ASAP.

-Kevin McCarthy