On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 02:18:55PM +0000, Richard Russon wrote: > Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > > given the small size of the active development team. > > And it's likely to stay that way if the community doesn't encourage new > people.
A good route to becoming a contributor is to start small: tackle bug reports, or small fixes and cleanups. If we already had a "janitor" project in Mutt, that would also be a good place to join. But since we don't, introducing yourself by proposing to touch the entire codebase is going to raise some objections just by itself. As the experienced committers have gotten busy, Mutt has had a problem the past few years accepting patches. However, since becoming a committer I have personally tried my damnedest to review and accept patches, and to give attribution to contributors. > You can't avoid that burden (assuming that the code will one day be > cleaned up). You can only postpone it. > Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > > there won't ever be a right time. either you accept that legible code is > > worth it, or you don't. > > Given the timescale of mutt (4 releases in 5 years), I can't imagine > when the 'right time' may be. Personally, and I haven't discussed this with the other committers yet, I would like to release a 1.5.25 around February and try for a 1.6.0 August of next year. During that time, I would like to take a look at a few of the external patches. Someone requested the trash patch, for one. So, no, there is never going to be a right time, but that doesn't mean now is as good as any. I like Arnt's suggestion of writing a tool. At least the tool can be audited and applied by a committer, as opposed to reviewing multi-thousand line patches from a new contributor. -- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA http://www.8t8.us/configs/gpg-key-transition-statement.txt
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