Re: Is Balsa dead?

[Rob Landley <rob landley net>]

On 10/23/2012 02:08:05 AM, Ildar Mulyukov wrote:
> 	Hello, everybody.
> You may know I'm not a noob in Balsa, being a long-time user for many 
>
> years (and also the packager of Balsa for ALT Linux).
> 
> And I want to convince you I'm not to insult anyone.
> 
> But having analyzed responses to my last bug reports and other mail I 
> 
> initiated here in balsa-list@ , I come to one simple question: is
> Balsa  
> development dead?

The above is how the reply logic mangled your message. It inserted 
blank lines at every place it wrapped. No idea why it did that.

I dunno about dead, but the stock version current xubuntu LTS includes 
(which is only one release behind what the website's got) it full of 
subtle bugs.
 
> I must admit that GTK+3 port is an important for this application, 

Important to whom?

I'm using balsa under xfce. I used to think that xfce was this obscure 
thing I (and Linus Torvalds) used, then Debian switched its default 
desktop to xfce.

I reluctantly abandoned kmail because it was not only bolted to KDE 4.X 
(which was as much of a career limiting move as Gnome 3 has been), but 
because it was getting sucked into the ever-expanding Koffice suite of 
Things I Did Not Want And Couldn't Avoid.

(AAAAAH!  My cursor was in the middle of the screen and it suddenly 
jumped to the bottom of the screen. The whole window essentially 
scrolled five lines  down suddenly and for no reason. STOP IT. It's 
making me motion sick. Don't change your wordwrapping decisions a half-
second AFTER I type something. That's creepy...)

Anyway, the point was I like balsa because I can ignore gnome. If I 
stop being able to ignore gnome, balsa becomes useless to me.

> but
>  
> since then I didn't see any activities except minor bugfixes nor any  
> big plans announced.

Yay bugfixes.

I like balsa becaue it at least claims to be lightweight. Yay simple 
and clean.

I don't want a textmode mail client that can't pop up multiple reply 
windows and still let me read new mail before I've finished composing a 
long reply. I like the _option_ to view html email when I need to.

I like mbox files that don't force me to stick with an email client 
(and that I can just _grep_ if necessary, or manipulate behind the 
client's back with vi or python or something).

I _need_ the ability to scale mailboxes to 200k messages or so, because 
I follow linux-kernel and qemu-devel and such and they're pretty high 
volume and I like to keep old messages there for reference and because 
a single thread can go for months sometimes.

I am kind of annoyed this thing keeps changing its mind about how it's
wordwrapping a paragraph after the cursor's already moved on to another 
line. (Stoppit.)

> Am I right or badly wrong?

I might bang at it a bit. but if so, my first priority would be 
trimming out unnecessary dependencies to make it easier to bang on and 
a better fit for use with xfce or fvwm and such.

And that involves getting the sucker to build in the first place...

Rob