[Pkg-mutt-maintainers] mutt-1.6.2, or neomutt?

[Kevin J. McCarthy]

On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 02:43:07AM +0300, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> As you can imagine, rebasing all those patches after every mutt release
> has been a pain for the various mutt maintainers.

Yes, I understand the burden.  However, I *have* been working on this.
I've been fixing and merging patches even back in the 1.5.24 release
(e.g. multiple crypt-hook patch).

I've also been replying to Debian bugs and trying to give you all a
heads-up on things that have been fixed.  Feel free to check out 763522,
128945, 434235, 742627, 711511, 759013, 751476, 774666, 775199, 800780,
816706.  There are probably more...

My goal last year was to get our first stable release in over 10 years
out: 1.6.0.  That was not the time to throw caution to the wind and
merge willy-nilly.

Since you've supposedly been watching, I don't understand how you can
say things like:

> - Richard has been a responsive, responsible upstream, creating a more
>   vibrant community around neomutt than mutt has ever been, so I felt
>   confident that any bugs arising from the neomutt patchset would be
>   quickly dealt with. For example,
>   https://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/rev/4f4c258ab95c was reported by yours
>   truly during my testing, fixed by Richard within a few hours and
>   submitted back to you.

> To me, the ideal situation would be if mutt upstream started getting
> more responsive and started merging in a lot of these patches, even if
> they are not in ideal shape yet (release early/release often kind of
> thing). This fragmented ecosystem with a vanilla mutt tree with 2-3
> commiters and hundreds of out-of-tree patches isn't healthy and it
> hasn't been for years.

as if I have not been responsive.  I've busted my ass to be responsive,
but haven't seen one email or ticket from you.

https://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=146590881614008&w=2
Reported 5:30am my time, patch posted less than three hours later.

https://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=146727863528137&w=2
Fixed same day.

I could go on, but basically the attitude that upstream is hopeless,
especially coming from Debian (which I've been a long-time user of, and
have tried to engage with), is a slap in the face.  Particularly, at
this point when I've been trying to do exactly what you are saying I
need to do: release more often, be more responsive, and merge patches.

That said, I don't intend to just take every patch and merge it in
as-is, and I don't agree that that's what it means for the project to be
healthy again.

> - We are not even shipping a pristine neomutt; we carry quite a few
>   patches on top of that already (sensible-browser, timeout-hook etc.),
>   so the same arguments against naming this package mutt could be said
>   about naming it neomutt even.

% cd debian-mutt/mutt-1.6.2/debian/patches
% wc -l neomutt-20160723.patch
32645 neomutt-20160723.patch
% wc -l */*.patch
1219 total

% cd mutt-hg
% wc -l *.[ch] imap/*.[ch]
110627 total

I think the stats speak for themselves here.  You are taking a ginormous
"neomutt branded" patch, (almost 1/3rd the size of our codebase) and
just accepting it.  It's disingenuous to even argue this is the same as
your other patches, or to somehow argue it's equally modified by the
Debian patches.

At least before, you had control over the patches, and could
affirmatively say how you had modified upstream (assuming Mutt is
upstream, which I don't think is true anymore).

> It sounds like a mutt 1.7.0 + neomutt Debian release would be the
> closest we have been to upstream mutt since 2006 or so. Would us
> shipping that as soon as it gets released as mutt still make you
> unhappy?

I would have been more okay with this.

It just upsets me to see a stable release, 1.6.2, be the testing ground
for removing the mutt-patched package and adding neomutt to the "core"
mutt package, particularly given you are aware of the work I've done.

It's more infuriating to see the changes I've been excited to announce
for 1.7 taken, partially botched, and labeled as a neomutt addition to
1.6.2.

Lastly, the implied vote of no-confidence makes me sad.

-Kevin
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