Rewrite in progress

For the last couple of days and weeks, there isn't much going on with mutt-ng for several reasons.





First, we, the core developers, have come to the conclusion that a "next generation" mutt really needs a rewrite or better: a (documented!) design made with current and future features in mind. An example which is just impossible to implement right now easily in an elegant fashion is transparent syncing of different folders like remote to local IMAP, remote to remote IMAP, local to (NFS-)local Maildir, etc. With the re-design ideas we have so far, this will be easy as it will be built on top of a "mail storage abstraction."





Second, we have come to the conclusion that when adding features, we spend most of the time trying to understand the complexity behind the current code to find the proper place for the change (sometimes we were even stuck.) Thus, some of the things we already changed only improves the situation from a user's point of view, but adds more complexity making it harder to maintain the code base in the feature.





A third and last reason for why we need a rewrite is simply the fact that we included many patches already. The main problem we experienced is that these patches are just add-ons, that is, they add features but for compatibility are not allowed to improve the underlaying design or interfaces to implement a feature more easily. Also, many patches are standalone and don't really integrate or work well with one another. We found it too difficult to actually integrate all of the foreign code, re-design everything "in-place" and thus make everything fit into a consistent mail client.





Andreas, the maintainer, has opened a branch with early ideas which are subject to change and which will be implemented as soon as they turn out to be the way to go.





Everybody is invited to join and start discussions on the developer's list.





As I maintain an automated blog for the mutt-ng subversion repository, you can also stay up-to-date on the rewrite branch via the following URL:


http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~pdmef/muttng.cgi?c=muttng-rewrite.


There you'll also find various RSS, Atom and even MBOX newsfeeds.