archivemail-devel list; release planning!

[Nikolaus S. <mic...@we...>]

Hello Peter, hello Brandon, 

this email is not very short, so if you're in a hurry, you may want to
skip forward to the last two paragraphs, which I think are the most
important. 

    As Peter suggested, I've set up a dedicated mailing list for
archivemail development.  Actually I first thought this would be drastic
overkill, but this way discussions will be public, automatically
archived, and separated from the -user list.  We are all list admins
with our sf.net addresses; I'll send you the admin password separately,
so no one's tempted to followup to -devel without deleting it. :-)  To
encourage you a little bit, I'm CC'ing our new, shiny list.  So, I
invite you to subscribe...  Say hi, list! :-)

    By the way: I've finally subscribed to the -user list.  And while I
missed Peter's analysis of the test suite failure when he posted it
there, his findings there still enabled me to derive a fix, which I took
the liberty to commit last night.  Thanks, Peter!

    And while at organizing communications: it's not really important,
but I hereby propose to shutdown the archivemail web forums.  There has
been a total of one (1) posting in the forums since 2002.  I don't want
to hide my bias here; I don't like such forums in general, and IMO the
sf.net web interface has a particularly rotten layout.[1]  Since no one
seems to use them, why keep them around?  Forums might be nicer for
noobs that depend on a GUI for everything, but our users likely aren't
of that kind.  What do you think? 

    So much for communications, let's turn to the real stuff...  I've
committed some first fixes to the repository.  These shouldn't be very
controversial, but look out. ;-)  If you haven't done so already, you
may want to update your working copies to pull in the changes; the svn
log should be self-explanatory. 

    While starting this email, I wanted to compile a complete list of
further issues that have caught my attention recently and include it
here, but the mail is long enough without. :-)  Expect details, more
bugfixes here and there, and perhaps queries from my side about various
things soon.  Please tell me if you're working on something or planning
to do so.  Or if you know about issues that should be fixed in the next
release but you don't have the time to tackle, again, don't mind to tell
me, I'll do my best.  Brandon, some old tracker items are still assigned
to you; what about these?  Do you mind to share your thoughts?  If you
started to prepare some code but got stuck with it, I'd be interested in
incomplete stuff, too. 

    Now, here's my big pet goal.  Considering that IMAP doesn't really
work in the last release, and I still being a Debian guy *g*, I'd really
like to push for another release soon.  This would a) fix IMAP for our
users not running Debian -- the Debian package is already fixed in this
regard -- and b) would make the upcoming Debian release, codename Etch,
for which the freeze is scheduled for October 18th.  Actually, to be in
time for Debian, we would have to release at least 12 days before the
freeze, that is October 6th.  Wow, that's next Friday!  Geez!

    Would such a close deadline mean to go for a hasty release?  I don't
think so -- the IMAP issue pretty much warrants a quick bugfix release
on its own, and if we manage to get further fixes or even some minor new
feature in, perfect.  And although the Debian package has some fixes
already, it is not really in the clean state I would like it to be for
the next two years that people will run Debian Etch, so the Debian users
would still profit.  So, personally, I'd want to try and fix as many
things as possible in the next days, and release in time so we make
Debian 4.0.  If you feel comfortable with this tight goal, but also too
overloaded to contribute, I would be willing to do the administrative
work, too: preparing release notes, doing the release itself, making an
announcement, etc.  The sf.net site is pretty well-documented, so I'm
optimistic that I could get it done without someone babysitting me all
around. :-)  

What do you think? 

Cheers, 
Nikolaus

[1] This applies to the list archives as well, but most of the time one
    doesn't have to use that.