* Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org> [2016-05-30 20:56 +0300]:
> On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 06:42:21PM +0200, Elimar Riesebieter wrote:
> > I've contacted Antonio Radici, Christoph Berg, "Matteo F. Vescovi" and
> > Faidon Liambotis via PM a while ago.
>
> I'll respond here, unfortunately without not much context, as that was a
> PM and I wouldn't want to forward without permission.
All is said in this thread. Nothing mysterious ;-)
> So, first of, a bit of a background for the ITP:
>
> - The mutt maintainers have been engaging with the neomutt upstream
> already. I, in fact, joined the mutt maintainer group precisely for
> this purpose. See https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/23 and
> others.
Well, I've noticed that you prepared mutt-1.6.1 which resides in
experimental. I suppose you had to rework the neomutt patches so
that they apply? The neomutt part is foreseen as a patch bomb to
mutt-patched which is IMHO a bad idea and will increase the gap to
mutt a lot. And this is the point where a neomutt package should
jump in ;-)
> - Debian is already shipping neomutt partially already; mutt 1.6.1-1
> already replaces some of our home-grown patches with neomutt's.
See above. You will always maintain patches and not an upstream
source.
> - Debian has *not* been shipping a vanilla mutt for years. Debian has
> been shipping mutt, mutt-patched and mutt-kz, the former two from
> src:mutt and the latter from src:mutt-kz. All of them, including the
> binary package called "mutt" are heavily patched, to a large extent
> with patches that neomutt ships (ifdef, compressed folders,
> trash/purge) but a lot of others as well.
The patches Debian provides for the mutt package (not mutt-patched!)
carry mutt to a more modern mutt package and should just remain!
> - The neomutt upstream (Cc'ed) has been incredibly responsive and
> receptive to requests, both in general and to Debian's needs
> specifically. Besides us, he's been bringing together many other
> downstreams (distros and BSDs).
Richard did a famous work and released a neomutt-distro patch
package, where beside others all Debian specific patches are
included and made applicable. A big thank you for him ;-)
> - Considering the above, consensus between the mutt maintainers so far
> (and AIUI) has been that the mutt source package should switch
> upstreams and start tracking neomutt. This would basically mean having
> *one* source and *one* binary package for mutt in Debian (not counting
> transitional packages).
You will have a mutt including a patch bomb.
> - This has been waiting to some extent on the new neomutt release which
> includes compressed folders and NNTP, released just today.
>
> As such, I think this ITP is superfluous, at least for now. Even if it
> is not, pkg-mutt should own this ITP, not Elimar alone -- as we are
> already the de facto downstreams of neomutt in Debian.
I intend to package neomutt which is an intrinsically package which
has a cooperative upstream. If we have a separated neomutt package
it should be easy to maintain and one doesn't have to fight with
fuzzes and offsets. It can't be the intention of Debian to patch a
GPL'd upstream to a totally over patched monster.
I would be happy about every co-maintainer as I am thinking about a
git repo at alioth maintained by the "neomutt-package-maintainers",
yay.
> We could certainly revisit the decision to ship two source packages in
> Debian, src:mutt and src:neomutt (the eventual deprecation of
> mutt-patched and src:mutt-kz is widely agreed at this point, I think).
> I still haven't heard a convincing response of what would happen to the
> "mutt" binary package, though. As I explained above, we're not shipping
> a vanilla mutt and haven't been doing so for many years now. Switching
> back to the vanilla mutt would be a regression at this point and break
> user expectations on upgrades. Keeping the status quo, on the other
> hand, would mean just a huge waste of effort for maintaining and
> forward-porting patches that neomutt upstream is already doing a better
> job at.
From my point of view the mutt package should remain as it is.
There will be much users who don't want to use mutt-patched or
neomutt. The sidebar, notmuch and nntp features for instance aren't
that popular for legacy, let say conservative, users. There will be
always a chance to choose between a mutt (with some incorporated
patches) and a neomutt package. And with a neomutt package in Debian
we will honour the work of its upstream!
>
> I also haven't heard a convincing response on what would happen
> with all of the patches shipped in src:mutt's debian/patches that
> are not in neomutt yet; effectively forking off the two packages
> would suck for either future maintenance or for our users'
> upgrades, both of which I find unacceptable options.
Well, the Debian specific patches could be merged into the neomutt
package and maybe pulled in to the neomutt git hub. A first step is
done by Richard by providing an applicable patchset.
Elimar
--
The path to source is always uphill!
-unknown-
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