[dev] Fwd: HEAD

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting "Brent J. Nordquist" <bjn at horde.org>:

| On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, "Roger B.A. Klorese" <rogerk at queernet.org> wrote:
| 
| > How does the Horde Project deal with HEAD and with scheduling releases?
| > Is there either a time-based or content-based plan on when HEAD might
| > spawn a release?
| 
| 'R. Idda hesitated. He said, "Such cases must be decided on their
| individual merit, sir. There is no way of establishing a general rule."'
|  - Isaac Asimov, "Mirror Image"

OK - here comes my short spiel about the need to at least start planning for
the release of Horde 3 (and IMP 4/Turba 2/etc.).

1.) It's been a while since the release of the last major versions (year and
a half almost?)
2.) For anyone who has read Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar",
one of the most important statments he makes about open source software is
"release early and release often".
3.) There's all sorts of new stuff in HEAD that is just yearning to see the
light of (mass distribution) day :)

Maybe we can at least identify what needs to be cleaned up in each component
so we know what to shoot for.  As far as what I work with, I think the new
MIME framework is pretty solid, not to mention the PGP support.  Stuff that
needs to be worked on for the next release (at least IMP specific) is to
tighten up the S/MIME support, add support for AND searches in the
IMP_Search interface, and some better charset support for composing
(although I leave to Jan all opinions on whether the charset stuff in Horde
is solid yet).

Maybe start releasing the code as 'alpha' or 'beta' to induce more people to
download and try (I realize we do snapshots, but I think people are still
hesitant to try something out that isn't labeled at least 'beta').

Call me names, tell me my reasoning or stupid, whatever.  Just wanted to
give my current feelings.

michael
______________________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu]
The University of Colorado at Boulder