On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 09:47:50AM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 04:05:35PM +0200, leo wrote: > > I've read that Neomutt is not a fork "We merge all of Mutt's changes > > into NeoMutt and get features into a state that Mutt will accept" [2]. > > No, it's a fork. And no, they don't get features into a state I will > accept. > > > It isn't a big problem ;) but I want Mutt and not Neomutt. > > Let Debian know then. I used to spend time looking at Debian bugs, but > don't bother anymore. I wish they would rename their package to NeoMutt > since they've basically switched their upstream. >
Hi Kevin :) it's the Debian maintainer of the package here. As you know I've been maintaing the package for > 8 years and we had various interactions in the past. I agree that the naming + versioning is confusing but I've sorted that out since we switched .tar.gz from usptream a week ago, not +neomutt2017xxxx is in the version, for example the latest version of mutt is 1.8.3+neomutt20170609-2. The main reason for the switch was that they have standardized code indenting, therefore a theoretical neomutt patch would have been bigger than the source code itself. The reason why we don't have two source packages shipping the same binary is because there is a huge duplication of work required on our side (we end up applying the same patches, building it with the same flags and so on), I'll be open to reconsider this if/when the neomutt devs stop rebasing their changes from the latest mutt source tarball. In the past (until 3-4 years ago?) we had more sporadic releases of mutt, which required more work to integrate all the features, and maintaing mutt and mutt-patched was a lot of work :( I know it is not simple to add a feature to the main code base because certain standards have to be respected and some patches might generate undesiderable side effect; at the same time Debian users have grown used to features that have been there even before I started maintaing mutt (compressed folders, sidebar, etc) so I have to play a balancing act there. Nothing changes from my side, I will always troubleshoot all bugs reported to Debian (so no need for you to look at the huge bug list :) ) and I will triage bugs to determine whether the culprit is in the mutt source code or the neomutt patches, in either case I will always report the bug + stacktrace + patch if available. I might have made some mistakes in the past so I'm sorry if I caused extra work on your side, but it is my intention to do a fair amount of investigation work before reporting any bug.
