Author: Nico Erfurth Date: To: exim-dev Subject: [Exim-dev] The future maintenance and development of Exim
Hi everyone,
here are my thoughts about Philips document.
1.1 I've to agree with Tony, a single line development would be the best
for exim. But I don't think there should be a seperate branch for every
release, but only for cases like exim3 and exim4, where most of the
codebase changes. So both lines can be maintained for some time.
3. One of my main concerns is that the documentation will get worse.
Philip did a very good job in this area. There should be one designated
doc-maintainer who manages the spec, based on NewStuff. NewStuff should
be maintained by the developers themself, to quote Nigel: "Even if we
have to use violence on the developers". Not to forget that NewStuff and
Changelog should contain some kind of developer tag.
For the releases, there should be a release-schedule, or something like
that, maybe a new 4.x0 release every 3 months. From time to time to time
there should be releases in between, when something needs urgent fixing,
or many minor-fixes have be commited.
4. Bugzilla sounds fine for me, but it needs to be kept clean, agains
Nigels "violence" comment applies here...
5. I think the wishlist needs a real cleanup, maybe it should be opened
for discussion. What items are really needed, what can be solved in a
way exim already provides. Many items are rather old and obsolete.
6. Personaly I like the coding standards exim currently uses, it's not
standard, but quite easy to read, once you get a grip on it.
8. Instead of patching the exim-binary it would be better to add a
compiletime flag. -DDEBUG?
9. millisleep = perl -e'select(undef, undef, undef, 0.250)' # sleeps for
250 ms
Finally, I think there should always be a "Head of Development", someone
who has the last word on new features and bigger changes. And who also
has a look on how other developers work, especially when it comes to
documentation and code-comments. I would really like to see the high
standards that exim has in this area will be kept in the future.
