Brendand, On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 09:49:41AM -0700, Brendan Cully wrote: > You're absolutely right. I and the other committers do not spend > enough time on maintenance (we're all spread a lot thinner than we > used to be, I think, and I don't see that changing in the short > term). We know it's a big problem. We need more maintainers (not just > patch writers), but we're doing a terrible job of encouraging people > to be more involved.
Yes. I'd like to preface my comments with a big thank-you for the work that you guys have done and continue to do. Criticisms aside, I (and I think we all) recognize that the work you do to maintain Mutt is substantial, and largely thankless. It's much easier to complain when something bugs you than it is to remember to express appreciation when everything is fine... > I'd be happy to hear what the mutt-dev hive mind thinks we should do > about this situation. I think there's the fairly obvious step of asking people directly (i.e. posting on both lists), if they're interested in being maintainers. You could also target people specifically if you're pretty happy with the things they've submitted in the past. There's also the matter of road map, which I think the various maintainers have always been reticent to address, precislely for the reasons Michael indicated in his post subsequent to this one: there is a lot of resistance to change. And so, the reticence is understandable. But e-mail has changed a lot in the last 10 years, and it seems to me that Mutt is becoming less and less relevant as time marches on, and even I--a dogged clinger to ancient technologies--have been finding myself wanting to search for an alternative in recent times. I won't presume to suggest what the road map should look like, but I do feel strongly that there should be one. If you want to motivate people to action, I think they need to understand what the GOAL IS. As for myself, I LOVE that mutt has a console interface, and I'm very happy with what it does. But there's still part of me that wishes it ALSO had a (perhaps optional) GUI with additional functionality that's present in virtually every other mailer but IMO sorely lacking in Mutt. It seems to me that with a sufficiently modular design, you could provide this to those who desire it, without impacting those who really DO NOT want it. IMNSHO it would be swell if Mutt would embrace the 21st century... As for the comment regarding the Mutt fork: in principle that's great, but in practice IMO forks are bad: They divide the effort, and cause problems potentially for both (or all) projects involved, trying to track important changes between them. I don't like forks, and unless there's a very very clear center of mass developing around one (and there have been a few prominent examples in my lifetime), I don't ever want to contribute to one. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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