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List:       mutt-dev
Subject:    Re: The future of mutt... - intermediate aggregation
From:       Derek Martin <invalid () pizzashack ! org>
Date:       2013-10-21 20:22:16
Message-ID: 20131021202216.GB13241 () dragontoe ! org
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On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 09:54:06PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 10:29:49AM +0200, jpacner@redhat.com wrote:
> > On 10/07/2013 10:29 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> chasing behind a quick-moving branch with much lower quality standards is
> anything between deeply demotivating and unrealistic - that's why you
> would need paid people to accomplish that feat.

Or at least, someone who has vision and focus, AND the time to
dedicate to the project.  Those people exist, though they are rare
(the most prominent example being Linus T., during the time period
when he was not being paid for his work driving Linux). 

Mutt might not *any longer* be able to garner that kind of support.
The number of people I know who use Mutt today has become A LOT
smaller than the number of people I know who previously used Mutt.
It's a small project which fills a particular niche that is becoming
less and less interesting, based on my conversations with many of the
people I know who use or have used Mutt.  Specifically: 

For a lot of people, its lack of modern features provided by the likes
of gmail, Evolution, Thunderbird, etc. has come to outweigh the
benefits of having a curses-based client with a small footprint.
There clearly are some die-hard users who don't feel that way, but in
my experience even many of those have spent a significant amount of
time investigating whether something else would meet their needs
better.  Myself included.  And for what it's worth, for me at least,
it mostly boils down to a tie of tradeoffs, where sticking with the
thing I already know breaks the tie.  Some of the existing projects
are pretty close to convincing me to move away from Mutt, though.  And
if there ever was a decent client that could work in BOTH curses mode
AND GUI mode, I would switch in a heartbeat.


> > ...] So, it would be a bit ill-judged if someone really wanted to make
> > a huge refactorization or alike of mutt only to prepare it for major
> > functionality improvements.
> > 
> what you are saying is "mutt is from the last millenium, and that's
> where it should stay". that's an understandable attitude for somebody
> who merely wants to get rid of a backlog of 3rd party patches, but isn't
> exactly a perspective that would motivate anybody to revitalize the
> project (it's oxymoronic to start with).

Indeed.  And up to this point, the maintainers have more or less
indicated an unwillingness to go down that path.  Which in my mind
puts Mutt basically in maintenance mode; i.e. development is dead.
Sooner or later I will find something else that "sucks less" enough to
move on...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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