On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:20 AM, Victor Duchovni <victor.ducho...@morganstanley.com> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:01:05AM -0400, Jeff Mitchell wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 6:44 PM, The Doctor <doc...@doctor.nl2k.ab.ca> wrote: >> >> > ??Out: 220 doctor.nl2k.ab.ca ESMTP Postfix (2.8-20100323) >> >> I know this (probably) has little bearing on the problem at hand, but >> if I used experimental snapshot releases in a customer-facing setting >> I'd be booted out the door. > > Postfix 2.8 snapshots are reliable enough for production use. Their > feature-set is not future-proof, but if one needs (say postscreen) > a snapshot feature, it is not unreasonable to use a tested snapshot.
The terms "stable" and "experimental" (and "alpha" and, once upon a time, "beta") have fairly widely understood meanings conveyed to users by software developers. Experimental software may be reliable, but there's a reason that the developers have not yet marked it as "stable" -- when they feel the time is right, they will do so. There are of course always reasons why you may want to disregard this labeling (such as needing new in-testing features this moment). This isn't a dig at Postfix -- I'm sure the snapshots are quite reliable, and I've never had anything but rock-solid, reliable behavior from Postfix. But I have certainly seen regressions in testing/experimental releases with other programs with rock-solid stable releases. As a policy it generally makes sense to listen to the developers' labeling unless there are specific reasons otherwise... --Jeff
