Gerard schrieb:
On Friday February 23, 2007 at 03:24:29 (AM) Jay Chandler wrote:
[snip]
I've also had to deal with the "Twenty something release candidates?
What, can't they get it right by now?" comments. I'm a big fan of Dovecot personally, but again, there are manglement pressures afoot...Personally, it makes no difference to me what naming convention you use to describe a software realise; however, there has been chatter on some of the boards that I frequent regarding this abuse of "RC" releases. Apparently, no one has ever heard of any software ever approaching this astronomical level of 'RC' releases. It is becoming something of a joke. I did see a reference on the MailScanner boards recommending not using Dovecot simply for this reason.
It's sort of besides the name, but the ultimate goal of a test series, if you call it alpha (very conservative), beta (somewhat conservative) or RC (Dovecot style) is getting Guinea pigs, and they simply aren't going to test your stuff unless you say it's nearly done.
I don't mind seeing rc99 as long as I'm confident the "final" is really final and not just there to reset some counter -- and I don't feel at all comfortable with all this pushing towards 1.0.
Software doesn't stabilize because you tell it to, but if someone's working on it.
It might be prudent at this point to do what Wietse just did with Postfix-2.4 and implement a code freeze. No further code is being added to the product and it is scheduled for release on or about April 1.
Timo's call, particularly the part about April 1 I'd personally call too tight a deadline. The influx of changes has been orders of magnitude above Postfix's.