[Dovecot] How long to 1.0?

[Reuben Farrelly]

On 11/01/2006 12:24 a.m., Marc Perkel wrote:
> 
> 
> Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 16:46 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
>>   
>>> On Tuesday, January 10, 2006 12:25 AM +0100 Fredrik Tolf 
>>> <fredrik at dolda2000.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>     
>>>> I'm wondering how close Dovecot can be said to be to 1.0 "Final".
>>>>       
>>> >From a developer's perspective, a better question is, "What's the roadmap?" 
>>> What milestones are still unmet before 1.0 can be "released"?
>>>     
>>
>> Mostly I just want to get bugs fixed. People still report some
>> annoyingly difficult to reproduce bugs from time to time..
>>
>>   
> 
> Timo,
> 
> For what it's worth, you are a perfectionist. Far more than most other 
> programmers. Most 1,0 versions of software aren't early as solid as your 
> current Alpha version. I'm not suggesting that you lower your standards 
> to everyone elses level but no one expects a 1.0 version to be perfect. 
> In comparison, think about how buggy the current versions of Firefox and 
> Thunderbird are. By your standatds they wouldn't even be up to Alpha 
> even today.

I'm mostly backing Timo on this...

My opinion is that "beta" rather than "alpha" is the right way to describe the 
software right now, it's certainly not ready for release, but it is certainly 
usable.  My definition of 'beta' is that of software which is feature complete 
but known to have bugs which affect most if not all people, and I think dovecot 
fits this description perfectly at the moment, rather than 'alpha'.  I 
personally have a small list of unresolved problems eg epoll with SSL fails 
miserably after about 5 mins with some weird errors, dovecot-lda is not building 
for me due to a cvs commit the other day, and in the last 48 hours I have had 61 
instances of "(imap) killed with signal 11" in my logs for which I have no idea 
why or what causes this.  Although things work fairly well...but for three 
users, that's a lot of signal 11s ;-)

I think Timo is right in holding back a bit because there are too many visible 
bugs and asserts being reported..  Perhaps more users beating on it when it's 
labelled "beta" might yield some clues as to what is going on and be able to 
reproduce the bugs before it's declared as "stable".  Because once it's labelled 
as "stable", many people will start judging the code and Timo, and first 
impressions do last, including how many errors are showing in the logs.

I'll not comment much on Thunderbird, I use it and mostly like it, but quite 
frankly there are some shocker bugs open in the stable releases especially if 
you're doing things a bit outside the norm.  In other words, I'd hope the 
release quality of nearly any piece of software was better than TB ;)

reuben