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_...
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