Continuing with the top posting mode :-( ...
What has been needed for at least the past year is to separate feature development from bug fixing.
The strong evidence for this need is that several of the beta releases have been quickly followed by another release, (often within hours) solely to fix the previous release. IMHO, the Dovecot project has matured to a point where the biggest impediment to usage in mission critical situations is stability of releases.
Timo, please do understand that I value the effort you and those who work with you have expended on this project. This project is greatly needed by the Open Source community and I applaud the results of your effort. I also want to urge you to separate development from bug fixing by making a formal release, the sooner the better.
Making a formal release need not stop feature development, even with v1.x. Just use the venerable a.b.c model, where "c" level releases are bug fixes and "b" level releases indicate new features.
Thanks, Ray
Ben wrote:
I completely disagree. If there are known bugs in a release, it should keep a beta designation. If you're ok running a software with known bugs then you should be equally ok to run a beta version. If you're not, then you don't run a beta version and accept that you won't have all the nifty new features.
One of the advantages of open source is that there are no market-imposed ship dates, so there's no reason to keep the baggage associated with them.
On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, Marc Perkel wrote:
Good to hear this. I know you're a perfectionist but in the real world no one really expects a 1.00 version to be 100% so if you have a few issue with 1.00 then there cam be a 1.01, 1.02 etc. People really don't trust a product until it hits 1.02 anyhow. So - getting to the point - I'd suggest crossing the 1.0 line sooner than later.
Also - maybe it's time soon to start switching to RC (Release Candidate) numbering indicating to the world that beta is over and 1.0 is coming. Dovecot 1.0.RC1 ....
Timo Sirainen wrote:
I'll soon create a CVS branch which is going to stabilize into the 1.0 release. I won't add new features there so it shouldn't really get broken anymore, at least because of new features..