[neomutt-devel] New marching orders - reviving dead mailing list

Richard Russon rich at flatcap.org
Sun Feb 7 17:07:51 CET 2021


Hi all,

> This mailing list was dead for quite some time

Yes. Sorry about that.

In the old days, when NeoMutt was young, there were thousands of simple
tasks that needed to be done, and *could* be done by beginners.
Back then, I discussed some of the bigger things that were being done,
here on the list. Those discussions were fairly understandable.

As five years went by, the tasks got more difficult. I often thought
about explaining them, but I worried that it would take me a long time
and my audience was shrinking.

Recently, ngortheone joined NeoMutt an gave me a sturdy kick up the ****!

He pointed out many things that I already knew, but was refusing to admit to myself.

> Large amount of technical debt that manifests itself in a web of
> interconnected problems, that form cyclic graphs.

This is true, but it's important to point out that we didn't introduce
these problems. We forked Mutt's code and have spent five years
improving it, but we still have much to do.

> ... somewhat stagnant state of the project ...

It certainly appears that way, but I haven't been idle.

I have dozens of branches of the code, where I've tried and failed to
tackle some of the large issues.  Breaking up the dependency loops in
the code has been challenging.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time mentoring new NeoMutt
developers, hoping to grow the team and spread the knowledge.

This isn't working.

It's reduced the time and focus I had for the bigger problems.

> A proposed strategy to break out of this loop is to gather and focus on
> a high-risk, high-impact task

I'm going to focus on one of the big dependency problems in the code.

> flatcap has announced on IRC a goal for the next release: 
> de-globalise Index and Pager

At the heart of many problems is the code for the Index and Pager.
(I'll explain in a separate email)

> NeoMutt is not Mutt, but it is not something different either. 

How true.

Cheers,
    Rich / FlatCap
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