[gentoo-amd64] Re: Can't Emerge Thunderbird-5.0/6.0

[Duncan]

Frank Peters posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 01:51:59 -0400 as excerpted:

> Sylpheed has undergone a lot of development over the years, but I really
> haven't noticed.  Email is a simple medium and my Sylpheed has always
> been simply configured.  I don't bother with any of the advanced
> features.

> I cannot comment on claws which I haven't used, but it is essentially
> Sylpheed with a lot of extra features incorporated, and, again, it is
> those features which I don't require.

Thanks.  You explained quite well. =:^)

FWIW, the pkovar (Petr Kovar) name may sound familiar to you as one of 
the sylpheed documentation maintainers (his name rather leapt out at me 
when I was reading the docs, for reasons I'm about to explain).  He's a 
gnome guy, mainly doing translations and documentation, and doesn't claim 
to be a coder.  However, I know him from his work with pan (gtk2/3 nntp 
client).

It seems pan's former long-time maintainer, Charles Kerr, lost interest a 
few years ago as he no longer does news on anything like a regular 
basis.  He asked for people to pick it up, but at first, nobody with both 
the skill and the interest in pan as a news client came forward.  Those 
were some dark days.  Eventually (a couple years later), khaley (nobody 
seems to know what the "k" is for, but he goes lostcoder on github) 
cloned the repo and started, initially, mostly collecting the various 
distro patches floating around.  He (if it is indeed a he) has become the 
de facto community maintainer, but for whatever personal reasons, doesn't 
seem particularly interested, make that not interested at all, in doing 
the gnome thing, where the bugtracker and official repo are, etc.

Well a few months later here comes pkovar, without any developer skill 
but with an interest in pan and an already active gnome account.  The two 
did the obvious teaming, and now pkovar is the "front man", while khaley 
is the technical side.  Combined with my long-time presence on the pan 
lists (first post in late 2002), and another developer who seems to 
complement khaley's conservative bent with a very active experimental 
branch, pan actually has more people working on it now than it has in a 
very long time, at least since I've been around, perhaps ever! =:^)

So as I said, seeing the pkovar name on the sylpheed docs was quite a 
pleasant surprise, so while claws seems more down my alley, I'm now 
devouring everything I happen upon (like this subthread) involving 
sylpheed with quite some interest.  At some point I may ask him similar 
questions to what I asked you, but I haven't, yet.

Meanwhile, ckerr seems to have transferred at least part of his interest 
to transmission, the gtk-based bittorrent client.  I'm not much into 
torrenting and when I do torrent, ktorrent has been my client of choice, 
so I don't know a whole lot about transmission, but it's interesting 
seeing people you know from working with them on one app, working on 
others, too.  And, I guess it shows the degree to which I've become 
involved in the community, that I can recognize the names as these people 
move from interest to interest, too.  My personal finances, etc, have 
never been such that I could attend conferences and the like, but the 
connections are beginning to come, even without that. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman