Offering to maintain Mime Mail

We've fixed a lot things for better mimemail integration in simplenews.
MimeMail and Simplenews are very good modules in general and work great with each other.
But there are tiny issues that finally make their usage entirely broken.

It's frustrating, that patches like #448670: Spaces and Line Breaks are removed from CSS definitions and #358439: Images are only in the first message are not being considered to get committed - and the last commit is now 21 weeks ago.

I've already sent Allie Micka a Mail weeks ago to call for action. Today i've sent one contact message to jerdavis again to ask him.

In case of no response i'll call for co-maintainership access to fix things and have a good much more stable codebase.

So i'm going to ask for co-maintainership.
As of [#251466] going to move this issue to the webmasters' queue in 2 weeks if no response occur.
Please see previous comments and issue queue for more details.

I sent an email to the current maintainer.

Hello Allie Micka. I am writing you because miro_dietiker offered to maintain Mime Mail.

Please reply on http://drupal.org/node/675950.

Best Regards.
— kiamlaluno
Drupal.org site maintainer

miro_dietiker, this is a very good initiative! I support your request; Simplenews will also benefit from an improved Mime Mail.

upperholme, even without coding skills you can help.

Sutharsan is more than correct!

Maintaining Mime Mail, and others like it, is challenging because:

1. There are many users with different server environments, Drupal theme configurations, Content to send, Email clients and webmail environments.
2. Most changes/patches/fixes break almost as many things as they fix.
3. Most users are focused interested in fixing one particular issue, without much cognizance of impacts elsewhere.

It seems like everyone who has taken the initiative to support and maintain this module (myself included) has had a great start towards getting things done, but eventually gets bogged down by the above set of issues. Co-maintainership would be helpful, but I feel like it would be even *more* helpful to rally some people around solving some basic support problems, providing "issue triage", and helping to test and/or develop a testing model for new commits.

I apologize for not giving this module the attention it deserves. While I'm generally active and available, I'm also spread pretty thin. To be perfectly honest, it's daunting to know that when I am able to carve out time for Mime Mail or another module, much of my time will be spent on wading through a variety of duplicate issues titled e.g. "please fix" or "doesn't work".

Drupal users of any skill level can help with this problem! What I am hoping for from this thread is more specific than an assertion of co-maintainership, because I don't feel that the fundamental issues will be addressed by adding committers. I am hoping that one or more people will step forward to:

* Follow up on and/or close existing duplicate support requests
* Follow up on and/or close new support requests
* Provide documentation or support to head off new support requests
* Test patches and setting them to "Reviewed and Tested by the community"
* Offer input on a sustainable testing process for new fixes so that they don't break other functionality

It is also worth noting that no client or Drupal user has ever funded any development towards Mime Mail since 2005. Our business model here at Advantage Labs is based on trying to make module development sustainable regardless, but just as with any business, I've got to meet my payroll requirements. Providing funding for work you need done is always a good way to get your need and the developers' needs met.

Allie Micka, Thanks for your response

I can guarantee that i've invested a long time in debugging mimemail and simplenews and went through many issues in both queues to have an understanding of what's wrong. We deeply checked interfaces and implementations and i also have a understanding of different server environments. Also i have strong experience in related standards like mime and smtp and implemented them in several projects and different environments. Standard compliance is a big concern.

The above fixes are waiting for fix and won't break a thing.

Once you're pushing issues to the state where things are RTBC you will find it frustrating too, to read duplicate issues again and again. So my focus is in fixing it to stop making new duplicates appear. I'm open to maintain also the issue queue, but bear in mind about my sight of priority. It's frustrating too if you need to mark issues again and again since they're duplicates of RTBCs. So i'll start working through it after the commit.

Allie you're asking for things we did. But i'm missing a clear answer to my question to be co-maintainer and i'm also missing (if not) a clear strategy how to get the present RTBCs fixed. Can you please answer them more clear?

Thanks! Miro

We all want the same thing: a stable, sustainable development and support model for Mime Mail. However, it costs us time and money to follow up on development or support when other co-maintainers are potentially committing changes without a holistic understanding of potential side effects or past/future development changes.

I am happy to review and commit these changes in any case, but I would also like to see one or more people helping to work on issues that go beyond a single concern. There are still over 100 issues in the queue. A majority of these are support-releated, and have not had any followup beyond the initial request. Only 3 of these issues are 'Ready to be committed', and no more than 10% of the rest are duplicates of these.

I am marking this report as fixed because the current maintainer has replied.