On Sunday 15 May 2005 15:55, Peter Stuge wrote: > This is a very interesting philosophical discussion that is becoming > increasingly common with many open source developers sharing your way > of reason. From a marketing perspective it's suicide, however, which > is also important to consider.
Not really. Look at the amount of 0.x version software on any given linux distribution. I use 0.x software on my desktop machine, I use 0.x software on production servers for years on end without an upgrade, and so on... For one, I don't think anybody's trying to market Binc. Yeah, it's always nice to have a few more users, but it's additional headache too. I don't know any open source developers who have god complexes like Bill Gates and want everybody on the planet to use their product. Rather the generally just write because it's what they love to do, and make a product according to their philosophies on the subject because they want to. They find a few users to test it and try it out, and pretty soon, they suddenly have a userbase :). Sometimes this scares the developer away into hiding for years on end :/... What really matters is the user perspective, you say. Well, looking at the industry over the last decade or so, I would say that your argument would have been a lot more valid in the past than it is now. All the big companies have made a joke of version numbers, even more than those who made a joke of them before did previously ;-). Windows went from marketing-oriented normal version numbers, to year, to 2 digit codes, back to years, back to 2 digit codes, back to year, back to yet another random 2 digit code (this time starting with an X because that's what's popular marketing these days), and what's this? The latest release uses a year again, but the next one to come out doesn't. To make matters more confusing, the particular branch that used years first switched to letters, and the other branch which used 2-digit codes first (NT) switched to using years. Maybe we can get Andreas to write a POP3 server and he can trade the version numbers between them every few months ;-). Microsoft isn't the only company who's done this, Apple jumped on the X bandwagon and has not released a new version since, even though some of their point releases have been quite different enough to normally require a major version change. Red Hat started jumping version numbers for the sole purpose of marketing. This was mocked by insiders, and was the reason Slackware jumped it's version from 4.x to 7.0 without ever releasing 5.x or 6.x (as stated in the release notes). Speaking of Red Hat, they were about to jump on the X bandwagon, but by then Athlon was already naming their processors after operating systems and X was used for so many things that it was starting to be recognized for the marketing ploy it was, so the stopped after 9 and went back to 1. Yes, I'm exaggerating slightly, but I think you can see my point. As an example, when I decided to move my production mail servers from BincIMAP to Dovecot for the time being, I never even thought about version numbers. I thought "I need an IMAP server, one which works well with qmail/vpopmail/maildir, one that supports all of the important stuff my current one does, and one that overcomes the problem I'm having with what I've got. So I went to google and browsed around for a while. I've used courier before - I now know better. I then came across Dovecot, read a bit, and gave it a shot. Did it ever even cross my mind that it didn't have a 1.x release out yet? Nope. I didn't even realize the version number until Andreas said not to use 1.0-test and I looked at the version number I had installed. Also of much greater importance than the version number is how close the philosophy of the author is to my own (which is the main reason I've been using bincimap for the last couple years). It's also become much more of a trend to avoid early releases in a new major version release (or minor version if major version 1 has not yet been released) when stability is of importance. To go even farther, I trust high-version packages (i.e. BIND 9.x) much less than lower-numbered versions (i.e. djbdns 1.05). That's just become instinctive over time as I've used different software and realized that stuff that's been around for too long tends to get more bloated and old bugs and bad programming don't die easy. I don't have any logical reasoning as to why, but this change almost always happens after version 4. Version 4's seem to always be really quite nice. > To come back on topic I'm glad Binc is past 1.0 and perhaps 1.3 > should become 2.0 rather than 1.4? Do you have a release roadmap with > features planned for Binc, Andreas? I think it's way too early for 2.0. I don't know how close Binc was, but my opinion is that the 1.0 release should be reserved until the application is "completed", meaning that the author feels that it has become the masterpiece he set out to create when he started. Of course, when he looks at this masterpiece, he probably sees room for improvements or has ideas on how to redo parts of it, but it is nonetheless a complete implementation, known by extensive testing to be very stable, with all known bugs fixed, no matter how difficult or obscure (feature requests are another story). Major version number changes should be reserved for when the product has undergone *major* rewriting, *severely* breaks compatibility, or has just become so much of a different product that it could just as easily be released under a new name ;-). Generally, one would try to maintain compatibility and easy upgrades from version 1.anything to the latest 1.x release, and save up all those big system-breaking changes in a TODO until there is sufficiently enough to qualify for the previously listed qualifications (and the author also feels that these big system-breaking changes are done for the best, and he probably spends lots and lots of time going through the code and making it better by breaking it even more ;-) ). I don't know how far along that path Andreas thinks Binc is, but I would say that in the case of bincimap, 2.0 should wait until completion of support for all the standard features and imap extensions, that is if Andreas lives that long and does not commit suicide from having to deal with A> our bothersome banter and B> IMAP clients such as Outlook 97. (and yes, I think we're pretty off topic ;-) ) Cheers, -- Casey Allen Shobe | http://casey.shobe.info [EMAIL PROTECTED] | cell 425-443-4653 SeattleServer.com, Inc. | http://www.seattleserver.com
