[Dovecot] OT - Re: Dovecot 1.1.x and 1.2.x differencies

[Stan Hoeppner]

Charles Marcus put forth on 6/16/2010 7:16 AM:
> On 2010-06-16 7:52 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> The point is that waiting a few days or weeks after a release for the
>> other guinea pigs to find the problems doesn't always guarantee you
>> won't run into a bug, as I describe above.
> 
> True, of course... I think babies should be required to have 'There are
> *no* guarantees in life, with one possible exception: you will die some
> day.' stamped on their foreheads so they'd see it every time they looked
> in a mirror. ;)

Haha.  That would just make the shrinks rich.

>> 1.2.10 had been out for quite some time, months IIRC, before Debian
>> had a Lenny backport of 1.2.10 available which, I installed as soon
>> as it hit the FTP. I found problems and reported them. This was many
>> weeks or months after the general release of 1.2.10 IIRC.
> 
> Yes - iirc though, yours was a corner case for some reason?

Yes, as I stated, I believe it was a corner case.  I do a bit of full text
searching of very large mbox files (10k+ messages, 50MB).  My Dovecot server
is a rather old machine with dual 500 MHz CPUs, which are actually overkill
and idle 99.99% of the time (which is why I've not bothered to upgrade the
hardware but for disk).  After I reported serious search slowdowns, Timo found
some problems with the mbox parsing code that were causing something just shy
of an infinite loop situation, IIRC.  It was also causing one or two other
issues with mbox systems, though I don't recall what they were.  Most other
OPs using mbox just didn't notice a slow down as they had plenty of excess CPU.

> 
>> I actually would prefer a rolling release system for some things.
>> The problem as I see it with Debian is they support so darn many
>> architectures the sheer weight of compiling all the packages and what
>> not prevents them from doing anything stable quickly.
> 
> Gentoo supports just as many:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions#Architecture_support

Yes, but Gentoo isn't supplying binaries.  The amount of project time/effort
to get all those Debian binaries compiled and out the door is gargantuan
compared to the Gentoo source model.  My point was that building binaries is
one of the reasons it takes Debian so long to get a new release out.  AFAIK,
Gentoo isn't shackled with this issue.

>> Debian Stable has been averaging about 2 years between releases. Two
>> years is a _LONG_ damn time to wait for a new rev of say, Dovecot.
> 
> I know... imo, a formal process for nominating certain critical
> applications - like postfix, dovecot, etc - for upgrading to stable
> would be a good thing. How often does a postfix update require an update
> to gcc or other system libs?

Almost never.  Right now this is done with the backports system, which I think
is fine.  They just need to be Johnny on the spot WRT getting the new releases
into backports in a timely manner.  With Dovecot they're actually not that
bad.  I can't really bitch about a few weeks lag time, all things considered.
 Replacing packages with newer versions in the Stable repos has its own set of
management problems especially for OPs managing large numbers of servers.  Say
you bring up a new server, install all the packages you need, then copy over
your current config.  Then shit breaks because the new version of the software
in the repos doesn't recognize old config files or formats.  Something very
similar to this happened going from dovecot 1.1.x to 1.2.x.  Debian OPs aren't
expecting those kind of changes to occur invisibly on the repos and would be
thrown for a major loop in a situation like this.  This is actually one of the
selling points of Debian Stable, similar to RHEL, etc.  Package consistency
from release to retirement.

So, I can see both sides of the issue.  As long as they can keep the backports
up to date I'll be happy. :)

>> What's the ETA for the first stable release of Dovecot 2.0? Less
>> than 6 months?
> 
> Only Timo knows, but just from past experience, yeah, I'd say less...

Well, I'd say there's a good chance then that Sqeeze may end up shipping with
Dovecot 2.0 when it flips to Stable.  Frankly I'm pretty happy with 1.2.11.
Performance is now decent and I'm not wanting for any features that I know of.

-- 
Stan