* On 17 Sep 2014, Ed Blackman wrote: > > I'm not one of the developers of Mutt, nor am I some representative of all > of Mutt's users. However, it seems to me that the devs and at least most of > the users like things as they are, such that you need to know a good bit > about email to use Mutt. Otherwise they would be developing changes[1] or > switching to another email client. > > That being the case, I don't know that passionate rants on the mailing list > are going to do much good. The people on this list have self-selected to be > users of a email tool that requires you to know a bit about email internals > to use it, and have further self-selected to join a list to converse and > swap tips about that editor with other like-minded people. Making things > easier for non-geeks, when non-geeks are not likely to want to use mutt for > many other reasons other than difficulties writing flowed or HTML text, > doesn't seem to be a priority.
We're not closed to further development on mutt, but it takes times that for the most part we don't have. Mutt probably is not feature-complete, but it's close, and we're evidently well into the long tail of diminishing returns. Personally, mutt annoys me in very few ways, and I'm pretty tolerant of those that remain. Addressing these relatively minor issues rarely claims my time. If it tempts yours, patches are welcome. I know what the response to that will be: "but the maintainers never respond to patches!" You're right. What's more difficult than getting patches is finding consensus on the right reaction when the problem being addressed is one that we (maintainers) don't experience personally. I don't want to transmogrify this thread into another "how do we fix mutt development" thread -- I don't know that everyone of note is paying attention. But I do want to make the comment that for me, it's not that I like things as they are so much as that I don't know what the right solution to this problem is, and I'm afraid I don't have time right now for reading the RFC, trying to sketch it out, and evaluating the various patches' solutions, etc. Perhaps I'm a bad maintainer, I'll accept that, but there it is. So what's really useful to maintainers (I think) is some solid discussion of the solutions proposed, and a community recommendation. I haven't read this thread through completely because it's a bit off course, but I've picked up on two implemented solutions on this topic: a VVV patch and a Gary Johnson patch. Can someone discuss how they differ, whether they conflict, whether either causes problems, whether they can or should be merged, etc? Do they solve the problem raised in this thread, work around it, are they tangential? We need this kind of help to move ahead on something. -- David Champion • d...@bikeshed.us
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