Hello all, I figured I'd throw in my 2 cents on the matter. Please note, I'm not a programmer and do not claim to be one. My views are purely from the standpoint of someone who has been using vpopmail happily for a couple of years now. It is one of the first open source software packages I had the pleasure of using in Linux.
1. I agree with the decision to open a Sourceforge project for the development of vpopmail. Sourceforge is pretty much the de facto standard with regards to open source projects. If we're going to have more development from the community at large, it would make sense to use Sourceforge for the repository. 2. I disagree with the decision to leave Ken Jones off the ownership list for vpopmail. I recognize Tom's right to do so, but I still don't think it's the right thing to do. For whatever reasons, Ken has not contributed to the vpopmail project as much (if at all) recently as he has in the past. I do not dispute this. However, I do believe that without Ken, or at least someone from Inter7, as one of the owners, this may become a dead-end project. 3. I am heavily concerned that the latest stable release of vpopmail is still at 5.2.1. I am troubled by this notion that it is acceptable in the business world to run development level software in a production environment, especially given that the latest development release keeps changing. What is the latest "stable" development release? The fact that Inter7 has, on more than one occasion right on this mailing list, fed into this notion of development releases being ok for production environments is a source of great annoyance. A number of the different software packages on Inter7's website no longer differentiate between development and stable release. IIRC, the latest stable version of vqadmin requires a development version of vpopmail. 4. Given the failure of Inter7 with regards to point number three, who is going to be responsible for deciding a particular development release is good enough to be declared stable? While the quickly increasing version number on both vpopmail and qmailadmin is an impressive statement about the power of community written software, anything related to mail server operation is not a toy. This is not something we just sit around with on a computer in the back room and run it because we can. Those of us using the software in a production environment need to know that there is a version where no new features were added and all known bugs were fixed. If 5.2.1 is the last version we're going to be able to call a stable release, sysadmins running vpopmail will need to decide if 5.2.1 is acceptable. If not, it may be time to look into some other virtual domain manager such as vmailmgr. The same goes for qmailadmin. Regards, Robert Kropiewnicki
