On 17/03/20 7:50 pm, Aki Tuomi wrote:
Dovecot is now a nearly 20 year old product, and during that time it has accumulated many different features and plugins in its core repository.
We are starting to gradually remove some of these parts, which are unused, untested or deprecated. We will provide advance notification before removing anything.
To start, the following features are likely to be removed in next few releases of Dovecot.
<snip laundry list of features to be removed over several point releases>
If you are using any of these features, please start preparing for their removal in the near future. Features will begin to be dropped as of v2.3.11.
Allow me to formally express my objections here. You provide repositories that automatically upgrade dovecot through point releases on various different package management systems, so here's what is going to happen:
Anyone that uses features you remove in 2.3.11 will have dovecot break on them simply by running "yum update" (or equivalent) at that time. This could be production systems that have been running for years on platforms such as CentOS 7.
Then things will break again in 2.3.12 (assuming you remove features then), and in 2.3.13, etc.
So you want to have a product that has a reputation for purposefully breaking installations just for running security updates?
Please consider holding off on removing features for the next major release, 2.4.0 instead. It makes sense to retain, in as much as is possible, feature backwards compatibility across a major release.
Peter