As some of you may have noticed, mutt-ng development came to a halt quite a while ago. The problem was that mutt-ng, in its original form, wasn't really maintainable anymore. We had huge issues merging changes that happened in mutt, as well as newer versions of the patches that we had integrated into mutt-ng. This led to a total lack of motivation to push mutt-ng development forward, and eventually all efforts were suspended.
Recently, I collected my thoughts about what could have been done better in the whole development, and my conclusion was that a fork can't survive without a certain user community, and the mutt-ng community never really got that big. Another big issue was the lack of the right tools, or at least the knowledge about them, e.g. we had absolutely no patch management.
The consequence of all that was that I decided to "restart" the whole project, but with different goals. The new mutt-ng isn't supposed to be a fork anymore, but instead a well-integrated set of patches against the latest version of mutt. I experimented a little bit with different patch management tools, and decided to use
quilt in combination with a Subversion repository. For those who don't know quilt: it manages a stack of patches, and you can push and pop them. The patches themselves are stored in a subdirectory called "patches". When you're a certain patch, you can edit some files, and then refresh the patch so that your changes are reflected in the corresponding patch file. To change a patch to a newer version, all you need to do is to pop as far as the patch before the patch to be replaced, copy the new patch over the old patch, and push it. If there are any conflicts, force the push, correct the conflicts, and refresh the patch. Then push the rest of the patches, which usually works with no or little extra work. This means that managing a relatively big set of patches is quite simple, while quilt manages all the "dirty" stuff.
So far, I managed to reintegrate most of the patches we had in mutt-ng, and also to port some of the mutt-ng-specific features and bugfixes. The new mutt-ng isn't as complete as the old one, but its pretty usable, and the most important things like sidebar and NNTP support work already. If you want to have a look at the current state, read
this description on how to apply these patches. As stated above, you will need quilt in order to use it.
Feedback is welcome, and I would also like to know if this new development model is desired and accepted by the community.
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