* Faidon Liambotis <parav...@debian.org> [2016-05-30 20:56 +0300]: > On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 06:42:21PM +0200, Elimar Riesebieter wrote: > > I've contacted Antonio Radici, Christoph Berg, "Matteo F. Vescovi" and > > Faidon Liambotis via PM a while ago. > > I'll respond here, unfortunately without not much context, as that was a > PM and I wouldn't want to forward without permission.
All is said in this thread. Nothing mysterious ;-) > So, first of, a bit of a background for the ITP: > > - The mutt maintainers have been engaging with the neomutt upstream > already. I, in fact, joined the mutt maintainer group precisely for > this purpose. See https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/23 and > others. Well, I've noticed that you prepared mutt-1.6.1 which resides in experimental. I suppose you had to rework the neomutt patches so that they apply? The neomutt part is foreseen as a patch bomb to mutt-patched which is IMHO a bad idea and will increase the gap to mutt a lot. And this is the point where a neomutt package should jump in ;-) > - Debian is already shipping neomutt partially already; mutt 1.6.1-1 > already replaces some of our home-grown patches with neomutt's. See above. You will always maintain patches and not an upstream source. > - Debian has *not* been shipping a vanilla mutt for years. Debian has > been shipping mutt, mutt-patched and mutt-kz, the former two from > src:mutt and the latter from src:mutt-kz. All of them, including the > binary package called "mutt" are heavily patched, to a large extent > with patches that neomutt ships (ifdef, compressed folders, > trash/purge) but a lot of others as well. The patches Debian provides for the mutt package (not mutt-patched!) carry mutt to a more modern mutt package and should just remain! > - The neomutt upstream (Cc'ed) has been incredibly responsive and > receptive to requests, both in general and to Debian's needs > specifically. Besides us, he's been bringing together many other > downstreams (distros and BSDs). Richard did a famous work and released a neomutt-distro patch package, where beside others all Debian specific patches are included and made applicable. A big thank you for him ;-) > - Considering the above, consensus between the mutt maintainers so far > (and AIUI) has been that the mutt source package should switch > upstreams and start tracking neomutt. This would basically mean having > *one* source and *one* binary package for mutt in Debian (not counting > transitional packages). You will have a mutt including a patch bomb. > - This has been waiting to some extent on the new neomutt release which > includes compressed folders and NNTP, released just today. > > As such, I think this ITP is superfluous, at least for now. Even if it > is not, pkg-mutt should own this ITP, not Elimar alone -- as we are > already the de facto downstreams of neomutt in Debian. I intend to package neomutt which is an intrinsically package which has a cooperative upstream. If we have a separated neomutt package it should be easy to maintain and one doesn't have to fight with fuzzes and offsets. It can't be the intention of Debian to patch a GPL'd upstream to a totally over patched monster. I would be happy about every co-maintainer as I am thinking about a git repo at alioth maintained by the "neomutt-package-maintainers", yay. > We could certainly revisit the decision to ship two source packages in > Debian, src:mutt and src:neomutt (the eventual deprecation of > mutt-patched and src:mutt-kz is widely agreed at this point, I think). > I still haven't heard a convincing response of what would happen to the > "mutt" binary package, though. As I explained above, we're not shipping > a vanilla mutt and haven't been doing so for many years now. Switching > back to the vanilla mutt would be a regression at this point and break > user expectations on upgrades. Keeping the status quo, on the other > hand, would mean just a huge waste of effort for maintaining and > forward-porting patches that neomutt upstream is already doing a better > job at. From my point of view the mutt package should remain as it is. There will be much users who don't want to use mutt-patched or neomutt. The sidebar, notmuch and nntp features for instance aren't that popular for legacy, let say conservative, users. There will be always a chance to choose between a mutt (with some incorporated patches) and a neomutt package. And with a neomutt package in Debian we will honour the work of its upstream! > > I also haven't heard a convincing response on what would happen > with all of the patches shipped in src:mutt's debian/patches that > are not in neomutt yet; effectively forking off the two packages > would suck for either future maintenance or for our users' > upgrades, both of which I find unacceptable options. Well, the Debian specific patches could be merged into the neomutt package and maybe pulled in to the neomutt git hub. A first step is done by Richard by providing an applicable patchset. Elimar -- The path to source is always uphill! -unknown-
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