Re: mutt development status
On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 04:06:10PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> so, thomas, unless you're satisfied with this situation, i think it
> would be wisest to officially resign from mutt maintenance and hand over
> to the mutt-ng guy (or somebody else, fwiw), possibly offering yourself
> as a co-maintainer/consultant.
[...]
> so far my thoughts. no hard feeling intended; i'm in the same situation
> with some of my projects (which [un]fortunately have less importance
> than mutt, so nobody cares to apply for them).
Well unless you're volunteering, and it sounds like you're not, I think
this suggestion is a little out of line. I'm not a developer - just a
user who follows the dev list and whines once in a while - but I think
anyone who wants to get more involved in mutt development should speak
for themself. And I would hope that if Thomas feels overcommitted (no
pun intended), would like some help or co-leadership, that he would /
will ask for help or make that known to the community at large.
And, I know he doesn't have much to do with mutt these days, but someone
should at least talk to ME before making any major changes of
leadership, and get his blessing.
I have mixed feelings about the mutt-ng thing. It seems to me that most
vendors (linux distributions, FreeBSD) who provide packaged versions of
mutt are applying a number of third party patches. This makes me think
that mutt is perhaps failing to provide things that a lot of users
want... and if this goes too far, we'll have a situation where mutt
behaves less and less consistently between platforms. I think we need to
strike a balance between "mutt does one thing and does it well" and
total feature bloat (hrm - maybe make a rule that one feature has to be
removed for every two features added? :>).
Personally, I don't want a lot of things that mutt-ng wants, and I don't
think that it's always a bad thing for a project to fork, but I am not
sure that both projects will be able to live healthily long term.
On a "putting my money where my mouth is" tip, if there are adminy type
things (i.e., not writing C code) that need doing, I can certainly
volunteer time, hosting space, bandwidth, etc. I would definitely be
willing to help if we want to try and get a better BTS (or any BTS) up
and running, if "we" (as a group) can figure out what we want to use.
BTSes: what's the deal? Can we not agree on a suitable system? Maybe a
working system that's not perfect is better than none at all? I'm not a
huge huge fan of the one that starts with "b" and rhymes with "ugzilla",
but that would be pretty easy to setup, though maybe some would object
to a primarily web-based system.
The spam issue was obviously huge in the past - if we have to allow
email based submission, I think we'll need to do some basic form of
confirmation / authentication for unknown addresses... maybe require
some sort of code-word to allow a submission through? I am NOT a fan of
c/r type systems, but it may be a necessary evil in this case.
Is GNATS what mutt used before?
--
)) <> ((
forever.