Am 23.11.2013 20:08, schrieb Eugene:
In recent years I use dovecot installed from FreeBSD ports. Interestingly, I feel that they follow the dovecot releases rather well but with some lag, e.g. currently it is at 2.2.6. I don't know if that is 'by design' or caused by lack of manpower, but it works pretty well in that problems usually get fixed before the update =) (And then again, nobody says you should install a new version on the release day).
Also, I am not sure RCs as such would do much good, since most of the test systems are not likely to reproduce the volume and diversity of production workloads.
in general RCs are doing good for several reasons
- confirm bugs in whatever patches flying around are confirmed to fix
- verify that there are no show-stoppers
- verify that patches flying around have no obvious regressions
don't know what release exactly it was, but one of the last year simply broke TLS/SSL using dovecot as proxy in front of imap/pop3
- i saw the relase announce
- built the RPM
- installed it on my testserver
- first connection-> segfault
that are basics which should not happen in any release of whatever software well, that is why you should have test-setups for them before call yourself sysadmin and you do not need the production load to verify "thats broken"
that there maybe other bugs only visible under load is a different story but bugs which are catched with a trivial test should not be in a release
so yes, RCs are fine because they prevent a majority of users get hit by a regeression from a random patch solving whatever border case in the CVS which may make only a few people happy and bite most others
that is why every serious software is using Beta/RC/Release they give people the chance to make tests *before* the release without need to compile each day the current CVS state