On 11/01/2006 12:24 a.m., Marc Perkel wrote:
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 16:46 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
On Tuesday, January 10, 2006 12:25 AM +0100 Fredrik Tolf fredrik@dolda2000.com wrote:
I'm wondering how close Dovecot can be said to be to 1.0 "Final". From a developer's perspective, a better question is, "What's the roadmap?" What milestones are still unmet before 1.0 can be "released"?
Mostly I just want to get bugs fixed. People still report some annoyingly difficult to reproduce bugs from time to time..
Timo,
For what it's worth, you are a perfectionist. Far more than most other programmers. Most 1,0 versions of software aren't early as solid as your current Alpha version. I'm not suggesting that you lower your standards to everyone elses level but no one expects a 1.0 version to be perfect. In comparison, think about how buggy the current versions of Firefox and Thunderbird are. By your standatds they wouldn't even be up to Alpha even today.
I'm mostly backing Timo on this...
My opinion is that "beta" rather than "alpha" is the right way to describe the software right now, it's certainly not ready for release, but it is certainly usable. My definition of 'beta' is that of software which is feature complete but known to have bugs which affect most if not all people, and I think dovecot fits this description perfectly at the moment, rather than 'alpha'. I personally have a small list of unresolved problems eg epoll with SSL fails miserably after about 5 mins with some weird errors, dovecot-lda is not building for me due to a cvs commit the other day, and in the last 48 hours I have had 61 instances of "(imap) killed with signal 11" in my logs for which I have no idea why or what causes this. Although things work fairly well...but for three users, that's a lot of signal 11s ;-)
I think Timo is right in holding back a bit because there are too many visible bugs and asserts being reported.. Perhaps more users beating on it when it's labelled "beta" might yield some clues as to what is going on and be able to reproduce the bugs before it's declared as "stable". Because once it's labelled as "stable", many people will start judging the code and Timo, and first impressions do last, including how many errors are showing in the logs.
I'll not comment much on Thunderbird, I use it and mostly like it, but quite frankly there are some shocker bugs open in the stable releases especially if you're doing things a bit outside the norm. In other words, I'd hope the release quality of nearly any piece of software was better than TB ;)
reuben