Eric, On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 12:29:23AM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org>: > > This is nonsense. There have been many discussions on this list > > about possible improvements, covering a wide range of functional and > > UI areas. The 1.6 release is supposedly waiting on some of those... > > and has been for a very long time now. And THAT completely ignores > > the idea that Mutt's design is over 15 years old, and its design > > philosophy is much, much older. Mutt, and its user base (or at least > > a substantial segment of it), could certainly benefit from being > > brought into this century. > > I'm just a user, not a dev. But you might have heard my name before.
I'm well aware of who you are, and this is not the first time we've corresponded... You've been around a long time, much as Mutt has. :) But not everyone is a 55-year-old hacker who wrote fetchmail. And not everyone wants to be. Please keep that in mind as you read the rest of my response. [And no offense is meant here; I'm simply quantifying, in some sense, where your perspective comes from... My perspective is not *so* dissimilar to yours.] > I'm open to improvements in the UI. There are some seriously annoying > misfeatures near PGP/GPG key management that could stand to be fixed. > One in particular gets me every time - if you try to PGP-encrypt > outgoing mail, but no key in your list matches, it is pure hell trying > to abort the key-selection mode. This is just the tip of the iceberg, really. Much more interesting would be overall improvements in new mail handling (one of the biggest things 1.6 is supposedly waiting on), better search capabilities and/or virtual folders, etc.--things that virtually all modern e-mail clients do; things that are nearly considered fundamental to modern e-mail users. These are features that people--including a lot of Mutt users--really want, but which Mutt does poorly or not at all. And--like it or not--HTML mail has become an important part of business communication for a lot of us, even in the technical world. However Mutt's ability to /handle/ that defacto standard is woeful, and its ability to /generate/ it is essentially nil. If you're willing to spend time hacking a solution together yourself, it's theoretically possible to make it work, but such a solution is far from polished or even what I would call usable. The one point I'll make about UI improvements is that it's extremely difficult to provide a polished, consistent UI, when the functionality to which you are interfacing is not your own--unless perhaps you've developed a fully modular framework that provides hooks for such things. But Mutt is not that. It's more like the Colonial Fleet in Battlestar Galactica: a mishmash of disparate ships (programs) that work together only begrudgingly, out of fundamental necessity and threat of extinction. =8^) This is why I think fundamentally, e-mail clients MUST move along the spectrum to a more (not necessarily entirely) monolithic design. Anyway, I was going to write yet another extremely long response to this until I realized I'm not saying anything I haven't said probably a dozen times on this list, every time the subject is broached by someone new, roughly every 6 months or so on average. So having said this much, I'm going to bow out of this discussion, and suggest that rather than rehashing it yet again, people go read the archives, looking for any of the many threads about mutt development stagnation. To briefly summarize though: There is a host of functionality that real users want, which it would be difficult to argue would not improve the usability, power and utility of Mutt. Ultimately, the maintainers themselves agree that development has stagnated, and consider it problematic, but seem to be unsure what to do about it, yet are also reticent to relinquish control of the project--or even to seek out fresh talent with more resources (time and motivation) to work on the various problems. Whenever this discussion occurs there's some flurry of activity around and concerning solving it, of varying duration and intensity, with progressively diminishing efficacy. -- 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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