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

[Simon Reichel]

Hi all,

this sounds exciting!

I have to admit, since I joined I was always avoiding to code in neomutt.
It is great to have a small sandbox to code C in, but as soon as I
opened the neomutt codebase I felt lost :)

I guess that I won't be of any great help for refactoring, but if you
see an opportunity, don't hesitate to ask!

Until then, I will keep working on the autocompletion API, understanding
the principles of C and carefully dipping my toe into the deep sea of
neomutt code ;)

Cheers,
Simon / Amudtogal

On 07.02.21 04:07, Richard Russon wrote:
> 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



-- 
Simon Reichel
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School of Biological Sciences
University of Bristol
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