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.