mikas blog

I used a self compiled version of mutt for a long time with a lot of patches. Debian’s mutt-package includes also some useful patches so I wanted to switch to debian’s version.

First of all I installed the latest version of debian’s mutt. And it sucked. Debians /etc/Muttrc unsets the variable ‘use_from’! :-( That’s awfull because the manual says that this variable is set to ‘yes’ by default, and of course the mutt-package does not adjust this in the manual. Changing default values by distributors can be useful, but please take a note in the docs! I found a bugreport on this topic but I think I’ll report it again (mentioning the docs).

Then I took a look at the patches I think are useful for mutt and sent a wishlist-report to add patch patch-1.5.4.aw.listreply.1 to debian package of mutt.

I’m using a light-color setup within mutt (white background instead of the default black one). mutt adds a strange black line within the pager-screen by default, I fixed that some time ago. Compare the unpatched mutt and my patched version. I sent a mail to mutt-dev which still did not arrive yet. *dang*

Another thing I did not like was the behaviour of some mbox-files. I’m using a maildir-setup but still have a few mbox-files left in my ~/mail (especially the ones from mailinglist-archives). But I did not see new mails in the mbox-files in the folder-overview. Huh?! Finally I found out that mutt requires folders in a single list. Adding ‘xargs’ as an argument in the mailboxes-command fixed that problem in my setup (‘echo’ would do the trick also):

$ tail -10 ~/.mutt/folders
mailboxes ! 
[...]
`find ~/mail -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs`

Now I updated the mutt-package to latest cvs-sources and applied the patches I usually need. Works like a charme now. If someone wants to use my debian-package of mutt, you can find it in the grml-repos: mutt 1.5.6+20041127i.deb.

Update: I got a very friendly and helpful reply (not!). *d’oh* :-( Ok, I definitely decided to work on my own debian package of mutt. I installed it also in the devel-version of grml. Some people are using my package already, please let me know if you have any wishes/feedback/bugreports.

This entry was posted by mika on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 22:51 and is filed under Computer, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.