Re: [Nmh-workers] imap support, and portability

[Joel Uckelman]

Thus spake Ken Hornstein:
> 
> While I don't disagree with you, we have to face facts here.
> 
> The sad truth is that MH/nmh development effort has been ... well, I guess
> the kindest way to say it is "lacking" lately.  And by "lately", you could
> measure that timespan in years.  The basic problem is that we simply don't
> have a large enough community of people who are willing to do the programming
> that it would take to add the requested features to nmh.  I have seen it
> countless times here: plenty of people here are interested in IMAP support
> in nmh, but they lack the programming skill to implement it.  The people
> who have such skill lack the time or interest to do so (there is a small
> core of whiny diehards who continue to complain that you cannot implement
> obscure nmh feature <x> when using IMAP; those people should be ignored).
> I don't see this situation changing anytime soon.  Unless, Lyndon, _you_
> are volunteering to implement IMAP for nmh the "right" way.  Are you?  No?
> Didn't think so.

A comment on the state of development: I use nmh for all of my mail. I
also am one of the core developers for another open-source project, one
which desperately needs more developers and developer-hours. So, despite
my total reliance on nmh, I probably won't contribute any development time
to it unless we reach a state where there's something I need nmh to do
which it can't do, because every development hour I spend on nmh is not
spent on a project which I deem needs it worse. 

(Similar things could be said about Vim. In the extraodinarily unlikely
event that it started to loook like Only I Can Save Vim, then I'd be
compelled to suck it up and contribute some development time there.)

So, from my point of view, it's a story of things getting worse before
they can get better. (On the other hand, my project has had two new
devs volunteer in the past week, for no cause that I can see other than
sheer interest, so maybe that will happen here, too...)

-- 
J.