On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 09:27:59AM +0200, Markus Osterhoff wrote: > * Andreas Kneib <apo...@web.de> [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. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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