On Tue, Jan 06, 2026 at 10:35:24AM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > 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.html > > Four 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.
I observed the situation around mutt closely for the last years, especially since Kevin's announcement of maintenance mode. As mutt works for me and me lacking a lot of domain knowledge when it comes to mail I saw no immediate need to get more active. The dead mailing list resp. the use of Gitlab was a major pain point for me. While I reviewed patches coming in via the repo, opening gitlab to leave comments is a big hurdle. I would appreciate if we could move more activity to ML again. That being said, let me remind everybody that we still have #mutt on Libera.chat - it also got very quiet over there. Happy to see mutt getting more attention and thanks Kevin for keeping the lights on!
