[Dovecot] Bus factor of dovecot / GIT

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 10:29 +0100, Thomas Koch wrote:

> somebody from the kolab groupware project recently explained me that the Bus-
> Factor[1] of around 1 would be one of their primary reasons not to use Dovecot 
> and stick with Cyrus.
> 
> What do you think about that? Is the bus factor much higher then 1?

I've created a company for Dovecot support, and if all goes well we
should have at least one other coder in not too distant future (anyone
want a job? :)

Also besides me there's already at least Stephan Bosch who has written
Dovecot's Sieve/ManageSieve implementations. I don't know if he'd take
care of the whole Dovecot if I happened to die right now, but at least
he knows the code pretty well. There are also a few big companies that
have some people who have done some Dovecot coding.

Also the Bus-Factor of Cyrus doesn't seem to be much higher than 1 to
me. AFAIK there's only a single person currently developing it actively
(plus I guess a few more not-very-active developers from CMU).

> Somehow related: Since the free software world[2] slowly converges towards GIT 
> as the "one and only" VCS, have you thought about a switch? It's much more 
> likely that somebody checks out your code, looks into it and provides patches 
> if the VCS is already installed.

I'm not as much against git anymore as I was when I switched to hg, but
I don't see much benefits in switching to git either. I highly doubt I'd
get even a single patch more if I used git instead of hg.

The biggest problem with lack of patches is that few people are
interested in coding a mail server. You can see the same with all open
source IMAP/SMTP servers (and probably commercial ones too). Nearly
always there's only a single guy who has written almost all of it.