Kenneth Porter wrote:
That's fine for isolated users supporting only themselves. But it won't win any mind share in the boardroom. If you want widespread deployment to get proper testing (and hence a larger user base) you need a version number that gives business people the confidence to install it. Otherwise you'll be limited to avant garde hobbyists who have nothing to risk.
Once 1.0 locks down, you should see a huge expansion of users. Bug fixes (not features!) in 1.0.1 will see further expansion. Any new features (like the recent addition of the wiki to the tarball) should be in the scary and experimental 1.1, not 1.0.
Three comments from a regular reader of this list:
Dovecot has been safe to use in many configurations for quite a long time, certainly through most of the 1.0rcXX releases. Many of the issues addressed in these releases are either in highly specific cases, or have only a marginal effect. Overall, the reliability and functionality of Dovecot is on a level with commercial software.
my experience at work - I'm talking about IT in the European Commission, with 20000+ users and a huge array of applications and development projects - is that no commercial software is free from "issues", whose impact depends on exactly what you are trying to do at a given moment. Everything has to be evaluated in your context, no matter whether it's Exchange Server 2003, Oracle 10 or Dovecot 1.0rc29.
"mind share in the boardroom" is not the only possible goal for a project....
John
-- John Allen Bofferdange, Luxembourg allen@vo.lu http://www.homepages.lu/allen