On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 03:16:46PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 Derek wrote: > > I'll be honest--what I'd really prefer to see is the two projects merge, > > where "NeoMutt" would be the place were things were tried, fleshed out, > > and refined so that they could be included in Mutt. > > > let me remind everyone that this is pretty much exactly what neomutt started > out as.
That may have been Rich's intention, but it was clear from the outset that it was never going to be that, because from the start he wanted to apply a bunch of patches that had been rejected by every Mutt maintainer to that point, mostly for good reason. And while it's not an insurmountable technical obstacle, it probably didn't help that he wanted to use Git for SC instead of Mercurial, which Mutt used at the time... [I've never had a horse in that race, and Git has obviously won since then.] > meanwhile, kevin has been actively hostile towards changes he didn't > deem "minimal enough". that's a reliable way to make sure the code > base is stale, rather than stable. I don't think that's quite a fair characterization either, but every change needs to be reviewed, and larger changes are a much bigger burden in that regard. > in particular: > - give timely and detailed feedback. you're actually good at this. Much better than Michael or Thomas were, to be sure. And a bit better than Brendan. > - don't be so conservative about the types of changes you accept, in > particular when it comes to internals. You have to remember where Mutt came from: “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.”— me, circa 1995 [For those for whom this is not clear, the attribution "me" is not the personal pronoun "me" but rather the initials of Mutt's author, Michael Elkins.] In large part its conservatism is WHY it sucked less (and mostly still does) than most other clients, as that was the main driving motivator for what went into Mutt (and still is to large extent). Adding features willy-nilly or accepting patches whose quality is dubious won't allow you to keep a reputation of sucking less for very long. It was quite trying to get Michael or Thomas to accept patches that were genuinely deserving--the same is not true of Kevin... so long as he, or someone he trusts, actually has time to commit to reviewing the change. And that does matter. > also, don't let derek have the last word too often, because, duh. :-D I'll point out that nothing I've shot down on this list in even remotely recent memory has not already been rejected for inclusion by all of the previous maintainers who'd seen it (including Kevin, in at least some cases). Whether or not you agree with me, THEY all did (or else we'd have had a configurable umask decades ago, for example), and our collective wisdom has to count for something. Our adamant opposition to such features always has had as its goal the maintenance of Mutt's reputation to suck less, and not just for its reputation's sake... -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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