Am 03.03.2010 23:55, schrieb Curtis Maloney:
On 03/04/10 09:10, Noel Butler wrote:
There is only one authoritative source who should be writing it if a book is to be written and we all know who that author should be.
I disagree. In the time I've been watching/using Dovecot (since the 0.99 series) Timo has had many cases of improving Dovecot [even if it's just a config option name] because of the points of view of other people.
For many reasons, I thinks it would be better if someone else [preferably someone with a long history with Dovecot, of course] were to write the book, and Timo signed off on it.
But for what version, as 1.x is in wide usage and will be for a long time, 2.0 is almost upon us, much of 1.x is not applicable to 2.x , so should Timo be writing 2 books? One excessively big book? Where is he to find time to write this whilst developing dovecot, and heaven forbid, enjoy the outside world with a real life :)
Given a sizable portion of understanding Dovecot is understanding email in general, I wonder just how much of the book would bifurcate for covering the differing versions...
-- Curtis Maloney
Hi all
I have never thought on so many comments to my question and i am surely surprised about the direction how this discussion went. I totally agree with the one of you who mentioned the online documentation and the wiki. I know that it exists and i used it for setting up my mail server, but ... as i said, i am old fashioned and i can better work with books. It's just a personal preferrence.
Well, i also know that many developers are still working on dovecot, especially Timo and that always new features, configuration options and so on are added, but ... it's the same with other applications in the community (e.g. postfix, apache, OpenLDAP, samba ....) and for all those applications books are available, and that was the reason, why i asked for a book. And to be honest. When i go thru the documentation part, most of the documents were not changed for at least 6 months. I am sure that between the writing and the publishing of a book new dovecot features will be introduced and not covered in the book. But everyone working with books knows that they can't be up to date, but they are a real good basis for me to start with the fundamentals and then add this information by new data from the web.
And guys just to mention one big advantage of a book is, you can read it offline easily!!
But there is one thing i want to mention at this point. Even if you agree with me about having a book or not. What i really like is the discussion about and the chance to do so, because dovecot is opensource. And for me this is in the end the result behind the idea of open source. Everyone has the chance to contribute, either by code, by suggestions, by comments .....
And that for me is more important than to have a book or not.
Thank you all for your comments.
Regards,
--
Mit freundlichem Gruß
Carsten Laun-De Lellis Dipl.-Ing. Elektrotechnik Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
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