Forking mutt

One thing that I always regretted about mutt that hardly any new features were added. A few years ago, I wanted to have a certain feature included in mutt, but when I posted this on the mutt mailing list, the only answer I got was that the authors don't want to add any new features anymore. I forgot about this again, well, until a few days ago.

And that was when Sven Guckes was ranting about the mutt development process in at.linux, closing with the sentence "mutt is dead" (he got famous in Austria's Linux scene for his legendary demo session at Linuxdays 2001 in St. Pölten, with quotes like "elm is dead"). At around the same time, another annoyance of mutt hit me that I wanted to have fixed once and for all.

So I started searching around and found lots and lots of mutt patches that added very interesting and useful features or fixed that little annoyance that always itched but that was not annoying enough to have it fixed. So, I thought, why not use the creative potential of all these people out there, take the mutt source, and enhance it with a number of patches out there. And so I (finally) had the idea of forking mutt, making it a more feature-rich email client than mutt ever was. Because open source is about feature competition after all, isn't it? Another advanced email client would definitely heat up the email client "market" (if you can say so) in the open source scene. And so I forked, added a number of interesting patches (and I still keep adding), fixed a few bugs by myself, and put it online under the name "mutt next generation", or short, mutt-ng. Of course, development will be very active in the next few weeks/months, depending on how much I need to do to get a really nice email client.

I think a fork was clearly necessary, as mutt development got totally stuck after the last release, and forks at the right time in the past did either produce very viable alternatives or helped the original project. Emacs/XEmacs and gcc/egcs come to my mind. So, my hope is that the word gets spread, that people use and test mutt-ng, and don't hesitate to submit their own patches, because unlike the mutt developers, I'm very happy to integrate feature patches and bugfixes.