On 13.07.11,10:03, Derek Martin wrote: > On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 09:27:59AM +0200, Markus Osterhoff wrote: > > * Andreas Kneib <[email protected]> [110710 02:27]: > > > * Eugene schrieb am Samstag, den 09. Juli 2011: > > > Mutt is the completely opposite to Firefox with... > > > > > > ...his stable version 5 (since 21 June), > > > ...the released Beta 6 > > > ...and the available testing version 7... > > > > > > Long releases, that's why I like mutt! ;-) > > It causes some problems. The odd releases are considered unstable so > I know some people/sysadmins who won't use them. And it's not > entirely unreasonable... 1.5 is actively developed and often bugs are > introduced that cause problems for people. They're usually fixed > quickly but you may wind up having to run a snapshot for a while... > This is the antithesis of what makes long release cycles good. > > The current stable release is 1.4.2, which was released in Feb 2004. > That's 7 years ago. It's seen a couple of minor updates since then, > only to fix critical security issues, so I'm not even counting those. > Want to see what's changed in Mutt? There's really no release notes > which discusses the changes; there is only the change log. If you > diff the change log from 1.4 to 1.4.2, the resulting diff is 3000 > lines, and most of that is stuff you don't care about. Good luck > figuring out what changed. Want to see what changed between mutt-1.4 > and mutt-1.6 (when it eventually comes out)? The changes are truly > massive; summarizing the changes in a digestible format is basically > impossible. This matters; if you don't keep up with Mutt > developments, when you go to upgrade your Muttrc will be useless, and > figuring out how to fix it will be a non-trivial exercise. > > Mutt is not a huge program; I think both Mutt and its user community > would benefit from a much shorter release cycle. Development would > focus on short periods of very targeted improvements, followed by a > period of bug fixes, followed by a stable release. I think 6 months > tops would be about right. Basically, I think long release cycles are > only good for a program that's mature and in maintenance mode. Mutt > isn't that. >
I agree with this one. A more frequent release cycle would stimulate more patches and bug fixes. Jostein
