On Sun, Jan 04, 2026 at 09:33:51PM -0500, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
Kevin is trying to step down from being the maintainer. Nobody has volunteered to take over his job as it is, understandably. He seems to have done it mostly by himself, and that's a lot of work.
Yes, to be clear, I would very much like to step down. Here are a couple emails from four years ago when I first brought it up:
https://lists.mutt.org/pipermail/mutt-dev/Week-of-Mon-20220117/001314.html https://lists.mutt.org/pipermail/mutt-dev/Week-of-Mon-20220221/001339.htmlFour years later, I'm struggling mightily to find the time (and enthusiasm) to keep at it anymore.
However, I'd also like to say that I don't blame anyone but myself. I have my strengths, and (I think) have done a pretty good job at the coding, e.g. adding new features, cleaning things up, and keeping mutt rock-stable. But I have _not_ done a good job with the development community: organizing, leading, and bringing new people on. Probably because I get too grumpy, am too conservative with patches, and am not all that charismatic.
So I'm asking for and need help: someone(s) to lead the process of creating a new leadership and a committer team, and to set up a vision for how Mutt development should go from here. I don't have much time anymore, so ideally it would be one or more people who are willing to dive in head-first and slowly get things moving again.
One idea I'd suggest is to get a 2.3.0 release out.There are only a handful of commits that have have slowly entered master over the past four years. But they are useful enough that it would be worth a "mini" 2.3.0 release just with those. For example, for IMAP, there is a fix to allow retrying to reconnect a configurable number of times (and with a configurable sleep time). There is also a fix to separate "attachment" versus "folder" browsing, so you don't browse your IMAP folders when you want to attach a file from your computer, and vice-versa.
I could walk through the steps I normally take for a master-branch release and let the new maintainer(s) actually carry it out.
As to the "dead" mailing list. Part of this is due to the move to GitLab years ago. When that happened, a lot more PR and tickets were created and handled there, and so less and less on this mailing list.
Another discussion might also take place about whether that is the approach Mutt wants going forward. I have reserved a "mutt" account on sr.ht, which could be an alternative place to host the repos, and switch back to mailing list patch review completely (either continuing on the OSUOSL lists, or via sr.ht mailing list) if desired.
-- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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