[Dovecot] A dovecot book ?

[Carsten Laun-De Lellis]

Am 03.03.2010 23:55, schrieb Curtis Maloney:

>  On 03/04/10 09:10, Noel Butler wrote:
>>  There is only one authoritative source who should be writing it if a
>>  book is to be written and we all know who that author should be.
>
>  I disagree.  In the time I've been watching/using Dovecot (since the
>  0.99 series) Timo has had many cases of improving Dovecot [even if
>  it's just a config option name] because of the points of view of other
>  people.
>
>  For many reasons, I thinks it would be better if someone else
>  [preferably someone with a long history with Dovecot, of course] were
>  to write the book, and Timo signed off on it.
>
>>  But for what version, as 1.x is in wide usage and will be for a long
>>  time, 2.0 is almost upon us,  much of 1.x is not applicable to 2.x , so
>>  should Timo be writing 2 books? One excessively big book?  Where is he
>>  to find time to write this whilst developing dovecot, and heaven forbid,
>>  enjoy the outside world with a real life :)
>
>  Given a sizable portion of understanding Dovecot is understanding
>  email in general, I wonder just how much of the book would bifurcate
>  for covering the differing versions...
>
>  -- 
>  Curtis Maloney

Hi all

I have never thought on so many comments to my question and i am surely
surprised about the direction how this discussion went. I totally agree
with the one of you who mentioned the online documentation and the wiki.
I know that it exists and i used it for setting up my mail server, but
... as i said, i am old fashioned and i can better work with books. It's
just a personal preferrence.

Well, i also know that many developers are still working on dovecot,
especially Timo and that always new features, configuration options and
so on are added, but ... it's the same with other applications in the
community (e.g. postfix, apache, OpenLDAP, samba ....) and for all those
applications books are available, and that was the reason, why i asked
for a book. And to be honest. When i go thru the documentation part,
most of the documents were not changed for at least 6 months. I am sure
that between the writing and the publishing of a book new dovecot
features will be introduced and not covered in the book. But everyone
working with books knows that they can't be up to date, but they are a
real good basis for me to start with the fundamentals and then add this
information by new data from the web.

And guys just to mention one big advantage of a book is, you can read it
offline easily!!

But there is one thing i want to mention at this point. Even if you
agree with me about having a book or not. What i really like is the
discussion about and the chance to do so, because dovecot is opensource.
And for me this is in the end the result behind the idea of open source.
Everyone has the chance to contribute, either by code, by suggestions,
by comments .....

And that for me is more important than to have a book or not.

Thank you all for your comments.

Regards,

-- 

Mit freundlichem Gruß



Carsten Laun-De Lellis
Dipl.-Ing. Elektrotechnik
Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)

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email:   carsten.delellis at delellis.net