[Dovecot-news] Headsup on feature removal

[Peter]

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