Re: Back on track

From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 09:38:11 -0600 (CST)
Message-Id: <199812181538.JAA27678_at_landfield.com>


# > So here is what I plan to do.... I am going to grab a few things out that
# > have been added during my absense. These are low hanging fruit that can
# > be quickly integrated into 2.0b4. I will then release that version.
#
# I hope you will learn from all this, that we want very frequent releases so
# that others can contribute at almost any one time, starting with the most
# recently released version.

I have said before and I'll say again. I am trying to get that type of setup in place but it takes both free time and money to set it up and support it long term, neither of which I've had much of lately.

# > It has had a good deal of work done to it and it should be the basis for
# > going forward. At that point we can look at adding validated html
# > parsing and dynamic string usage.
#
# I'm dissapointed you removed all my sweat and tears that easily. What good is
# b4 without dynamic strings? In my view, more than 50% of all bugs we get to
# hear about here on the list is about buffer overflows. My version is really
# close to have fixed all of those problems.

I have not removed anything here. I am going to put out a stable version that had a great deal of work and testing done to it. I hear a lot more bugs about other things as well. I'll go back and see what makes sense to go forward. Some does not. I am looking to make hypermail much more modular so that it is easier to do unit level testing. The unit level tests will be available on on the web site soon. Via unit testing I've found some really nasty bugs while adding more robustness. I am trying to setup a regression test environment that all will be able to download from the web for ongoing development testing.

# I would've suggested that you put your changes on the 2b12 version since my
# changes were all over and change a lot of the infrastructure because of the
# dynamic strings.

And that is a good deal of the problem. You made too many changes everywhere for me to take the time to do that at this point. Some I like, some I don't understand why they were done. I need to study the changes and we need to discuss a bit before I just merge them in.

# I would've appriciated a little discussion about this before you did this.

We seem to have different ideas as to what you were trying to accomplish while I was out. Hypermail is a well used tool that needs a bit more stability than rapid prototype development efforts generally have. I need to rethink the beta designation I've been placing on releases. It has seriously confused people. I'm spending a good deal of time doing nothing more than testing different configurations so that I can be relatively confident that a new release will not muck up existing archives. Nobody needs that...

I do appreciate the efforts you've made and I am not trivializing them but there are more issues here... I'm starting to think we may need to have a hypermail-dev mailing list for truly alpha development. That way alpha versions that should run under controlled, non-production test environments could be passed around without confusing the list at large as to what is the most stable version to run in a production environment.

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
Email: kent_at_landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net                   http://www.nfr.net/
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Received on Fri 18 Dec 1998 05:39:01 PM GMT

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