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

[Antonio Radici]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 09:33:09AM -0700, Kevin McCarthy wrote:
> 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.

Hi Kevin,
as I said on the original thread I'm planning to fix this, and as you can see
there have been no new releases until the fix is in place.

As I stated already this is not going to be fixed for the existing stable
distribution (because we cannot change what was already shipped), but this is
certainly going to be fixed for the current unstable/testing.

I would expect this to be done in August, it is a slight delay from what we
discussed on a mailing list but nothing has changed from my plans.