[neomutt-devel] On the (lack of) use of the Mailing List

[Guyzmo]

Hi all 🙌

    in more than 20 years of IRC, I think that's the first time I think
we should have a lower signal/noise ratio on IRC, and have some of the
thought process shared by mail. That does not mean we need to have only
noise on IRC, just that we need to discuss stuff in a more elaborate and
open way.

That way it gives the opportunity for everybody to have a voice some of
us are in a different timezone than others, and it's jump in a
discussion that happened hours ago.

Also it helps reasoning in a more elaborate manner, so please follow
the usenet netiquette (no top posting, quote only the necessary, change
the subject if the discussion drifts), making it possible to follow a
discussion and argue exactly where it's relevant.

All in all, we're hacking a bloody _MAIL_ User Agent, and we're not even
using the _MAILing_ List!

So here are the topics that we're discussing in length on IRC, that are
too early to be in github issues (thank you SvenG for the notes).

* Build system (autotools vs cmake)
  * cf https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/321
  * we'd need to dig deeper in the discussion of autotools vs cmake (and any other build toolchain)

* Fork
  * more refactoring means more changes - and probably breaking away from mutt.
  * changing to other libraries will change a lot, too.
  * "libuv" → depends on cmake
  * so.. when to split - and how?
  * change all "mutt" to "neomutt" - in the code, docs, manual etc.
  * "Object Orientedness"..
    dkc:  all mailbox implement the same set of functions, defined in
          struct mx_ops, that way we can have generic code in mx.c that doesn't
          care about underlying implementation, it just calls the open, open_msg,
          close_msg, close callbacks on a mailbox to open a message
          it's mainly for code maintanability, not for speed

* Testing
  * which platforms/systems are supported?
  * which old ones should be dropped? (AIX, Solaris?)
    * it's pretty clear that we can't drop Slowlaris 
      cf https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/321#issuecomment-274365855
  * who has access to which systems? who would test new versions?
    * "sunny256:  I'm going to test the neomutt build on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD later today."
  * add contacts to the distro overview - for those who volunteer.
  * how can we implement regression tests that are meaningful? Can we
    design a plan towards that?

* Refactoring
 * [libraries] should more functions be replaced by moving to gnulib or libuv?
 * [C flavour]
   * flatcap: mutt supports C99 (which isn't too bad), but not C11 there are
     probably more people out there with C99 compilers than with C11 compilers
   * clang ≥ 3.0 and GCC ≥ 4.9 have full C11 support, and both are more
     than 5 years old.
 * [Spaces vs Tabs] killall TABs?
 * add comments to all return codes

So I guess, there's some base here to start discussing design issues.
I'm launching three new threads with the above to bootstrap discussion.

Cheers,

-- 
Guyzmo