[Dovecot] 1.0.rc29 released

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Dean Brooks <dean at iglou.com>:

> I have to agree with you on this.  I'm relatively new with Dovecot and
> have been evaluating it for deployment in a production environment.  I
> must say that Dovecot has the most unusual development method of a
> large-scale project I've seen.

I've seen about the same from other pre-1.0 software projects.  The usual
problem (and I have no idea if this describes Timo accurately or not,
though it appears as such to me), is that the people (usually one person)
heading the project are not experienced with large-scale software releases,
and they make some simple mistakes.  Often they look back years later and
reflect on how they were "in over their heads" when they started, etc.

But, let me also say, that in the above paragraph I am thinking of 3
projects, all of which I use in production, all of which I love, all
of which have worked out their problems after their first major release.

I would say, in general, these types of things are just "growing pains"
and shouldn't be too surprising to most people.  What would be surprising
(and bad) was if they continued through the following releases.

Timo has already admitted his errors on the mailing list recently, and
has already sought advice on how to fix them in the future, so I would
think the future is bright for dovecot.  And eventually, we'll all
forget the past...

> There have been so many show-stopping bugs in the past 10 releases
> that I wouldn't even consider this a candidate for a Beta release
> at this point, let alone a production release.

Actually, that is more due to the large number of RC cuts Timo makes,
rather than the number of bugs in the code, IMHO.  I've found several
of the releases to be very stable for me, as have others.  Of course,
I'm very selective as to which I install and test; I don't test each
RC that comes out (in particular, since I run mbox, I don't run ones
that have only maildir fixes, etc).

> I'm very appreciative of all the hard-work the author(s) have put into
> this, but I think at some point they need to take a hard-look at the
> way they develop and release distributions.  It seems extremely sloppy
> and I know it's confusing to others besides myself.

I believe Timo already has done so, based on his comments on the list,
and his requests for help on things like versioning systems, test suites,
etc.  If you've been reading the list over the last couple months, I
think you would recognize this.  But then, I don't speak for Timo.

> --
> Dean Brooks
> dean at iglou.com

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!