On Sunday, 28 October 2001 at 04:48, Russell Hoover wrote:
> It has now been -- to the day -- exactly one year and three months since
> a stable-branch, general-release version of mutt has appeared.
>
> While the developer-branch continues to evolve (and is now at version
> 1.3.23i), the stable branch stagnates at 1.2.5i.
>
> Maybe there is, in fact, a good reason for this -- I don't know. But I
> (and lots of others, I'm sure) would like to know.
>
> Would someone from the mutt developer community mind giving a heads-up
> as to the philosophy or current thinking about this situation?
>
> It just seems to me that the longer it goes on, the more difficult it will
> be for stable-branch users to make the change-over to a mutt-1.4.0 or
> whatever, as so many things will have changed so radically.
I don't think the number of big changes is that bad. But as for why
1.2 stagnates, I think that's a simple lack of resources. Thomas is one
man, and while some parts of the codebase are unofficially delegated
(like IMAP, POP or EGE's charset stuff), each of these components also
only has one "maintainer". Backporting fixes makes twice the work (or
often more than that, if the architecture of the affected component has
any significant changes), and thus twice the time.
If you can convince Alan Cox to maintain the stable branch of mutt, I'm
sure we'd all welcome him :)
-b
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