[2010-12-01 23:21] Ken Hornstein <k...@pobox.com> > > And if your > email provider goes to an IMAP solution, you'll get to a point where > nmh simply won't work for you anymore unless you're really hardcore > and willing to cook up a bunch of crazy solutions ... and those > people are becoming rarer and rarer.
(This quote only as a general starting point. If you take IMAP as working in the remote mail storage with IMAP commands, then nmh's basic mail storage concept would likely need to be abandonned. But that's a different topic.) Although you don't like to hear it, moving from being a complete mail system that tries to handle everything about email to an only MUA would solve many future problems. Let me tell a story: MH had been a large and common company with good, active employees (developers) and good business (relevance). It covered everything people needed to do emailing; emailing had been quite easy then. Later, as the work of the employees decreased and email became more difficult to handle (both may be connected) MH's business got worse but still had been good enough. Then nmh came and took over the work with partly new and motivated employees. They worked hard on covering all this new email stuff. This had been an improvement for the business. Now we're back at the same poiint. The employees are less and work less while emailing became even more complex. The business is quite low currently, actually most people don't choose nmh anymore, although it tries to provide everything for emailing, they just cannot use it for ``normal'' (= modern) emailing. That's really sad. Unfortunately, sad gets us nowhere. In business the situation is clear: A heavy change needs to take place in order to save the company from dying. Free Software is a bit different but many of the general principles are similar. What companies would do: Strip all the parts of the firm that are not the core business. Then concentrate on the core/niche and try to gain relevance there again. If this goes well, the company can grow its product portfolio again. Emailing is so complex and nmh has only few active development. We simply cannot keep up. We cannot still provide a whole emailing system; we have problems in each part. Nmh falls back behind more and more and the effort that we are able to do is too small because of the large code base that we want to maintain with few development power. Of course nmh can go along like it did, but how vivid will it be in some years? Of course there exists a lot of projects with ancient code in order to provide compatibility, but that's almost dead code. Next generations will have read of it in their history books ... great! I would understand if you some of you want to have nmh stay as it is because that's all they need and all the kind of emailing they do and will do for the rest of their life. But for the others, I really do believe that we need to figure out how to go for the future. And that might include general changes, maybe a fork. (I'm really thinking about forking myself and developing an experimental version as a show case.) I am young and I have my life in front of me and I am enthusiastic to develop Free Software and I do want to use nmh still in many years and I do want to be able to tell friends to use nmh without adding that the really need to be able to suffer hard if they want to try. meillo P.S. I had been in emotion writing this. I do not want to put up all this discussion that keeps you from developing. Though, it seems to me as if we need to think about the future some day do. It will not happen tomorrow or next week, but somewhen we're in the future, suddenly. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
