Hi,
>> Let me propose a fairly minor change in the development process.
>>
> you are proposing a fork on mutt's own infrastructure.
Not at all. Look at many other projects. Even huge projects like Fedora
("not guaranteed to work in a production environment") and RHEL
("everything bundled is guaranteed to work together at the expense of
providing old versions") are using this approach.
> i'm not quite
> sure whether you are incredibly naive or incredibly sneaky. ;)
A whimsical mix of both :)
> nope, what it takes to make a project alive is a leader: somebody with
> the competence and time to deliver results. and in the case of reviving
> a stale project, it must also be somebody with the balls and inclination
> to push beyond the incredible stop power (be it passive or active) found
> in the existing (non-)maintainer community.
This was the usual approach to manage projects in the past. Such
person(s) is a bottleneck. In reality, much more people are working on
stable releases than on any other (nightly builds, minor releases,
releases proving/contradicting usability of new features etc.) and
therefore today many projects are moving away from this kind of hierarchy.
I'm aware of many mutt users (presumably forming a majority) who demand
stable releases. This is addressed in my proposal. But as for the
development itself, it needs to be alive and show vitality in upstream
(not only in trac or on mailing lists).
> an additional problem with mutt (like most other software) is that it
> isn't particularly well written - the mailbox driver model is a mess,
> and a search for a MVC pattern (c.f. the idea to tack another UI on it)
> is futile.
You must be right.
> that means that anyone who'd want to make major functionality
> improvements would have to start with substantial refactoring.
Well, then he should be aware of the fact, that this is not mutt's goal
if I'm not mistaken. Today one can create a simple MUA in python in
about one day satisfying his own needs. So, it would be a bit ill-judged
if someone really wanted to make a huge refactorization or alike of mutt.
> p.s.: i for one would immediately ditch mutt if i found a similarly
> powerful and stable gui MUA where keyboard navigation is the primary
> focus and not an afterthought (guis try to be non-modal, which means
> that the relevant pane will easily lose focus for any number of reasons,
> which completely screws up fast navigation). if somebody has suggestions
> ... ;)
Python and a few free weekends :)
-- Jan Pacner
