[neomutt-devel] mutt vs neomutt

[Antonio Radici]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 12:07:27AM +0200, Sven Guckes wrote:
> hi!
> 
> i see that all the debian packages
> of mutt are now all neomutt.
> 
> install mutt - receive neomutt.
> this sounds all pretty confusing.
> 
> so.. what are the plans here?
> will there be only one package?
> who will do the support? etc
> will there be a "native" mutt package again?

I'm the person responsible for this :)
Debian has been using a heavily packaged version of mutt for a long time
(compressed folders, trash, sidebar, etc), once neomutt came and included all
these patches we decided to adopt it (paravoid@ did a fantastic ground work
there).

We had a couple of changes of the main mutt maintainers and we had
(and have) good relationship with them, so it's not a fork/protest or anything
else.

Recently the neomutt team worked on a code formatting change (indent, etc) which
caused the neomutt patch to be bigger than the source code, therefore I decided
to rebase the upstream code from mutt, by having a better version name which now
clarifies which version of mutt we are using and which version of neomutt, in
the past you had to look at the changelog (e.g. 1.8.3+neomutt20170609-1).

I found Richard and the neomutt-devel@ team pretty responsive to all our
requests and I find that it is also easier to get the patches in, therefore I
expect to continue to use neomutt as upstream.
The plans for the future is to continue to do that, the support will be provided
by me for Debian specific bugs and the neomutt-devel for bugs related to patches
and in some cases I will continue to file upstream bugs for patches that could
be included in mutt.

I think the confusion is now clarified with the new version name, in the past
you got neomutt and you didn't know (since 1.6.2-1 if I'm not wrong), now it's
clear and I will have less work to do in terms of patches to integrate.