Re: A snapshot release?

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 18:36 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> I'd like to know if you're interested in putting a snapshot release into
> Fedora Extras.  I'm willing to package it up and maintain it within
> Fedora Extras.  There has been some interest in testing your software
> out, and we could release it into the Extras Development strain that is
> being used in conjunction with the Fedora Core development strain
> leading up to Fedora Core 6.

> Thoughts?

I have only one issue with already making releases: that is that people
will (or might) expect a certain API stability which I can't guarantee
at this moment. I'm also convinced making API stability promises would
block my ideas too early: I'm still a little bit in the experimenting
phase and design iterations of this project happen frequently.

As I like Agile development models, you can expect tinymail to go into a
new design iteration at any time.

For example, I might even start using a totally new namespace or naming
scheme. Not that I'm really planning to do that. But as time moves by, I
might find myself getting into difficulties with certain language
binding generators. Such issues would force me to massively start
renaming and redesigning things. Flexibility is at this moment more
important than API stability.

Also note that tinymail is being build as a framework, not an
application. I agree there's a ui in de repository, but you should
consider this ui application as a demo-in-c and prove of concept for
libtinymail. 

However. I would certainly agree with the Fedora Extra's team building
packages and I would help and make sure all packaging issues get
resolved as soon as possible. As also packaging is, of course, an
important aspect for a project like tinymail. As I've been using the
standard autoconf and automake tools, doing the spec file shouldn't be
very difficult.

My main concern with packages is that people might have certain API
stability expectations which I can't yet promise. Just always keep that
in mind when making promises about the framework to your customers or
bosses (for example when starting a software on top of tinymail).

My current plans are to help and support the maemo team with their ideas
for libtinymail. Their request have (at this moment) a priority and I
will do API breakage without hesitating.


So let me know what the Fedora plans are, and I'll see what I can do. If
you want the query the health of the project: At this moment there's no
team behind tinymail: I'm the only nut working on it ;-). I don't know
whether or not that will change. It might or, I can imagine that
changing. I know a lot people have been asking questions and reading the
code. One exception: one person cooked me the python bindings. For
copyright ownership: I copied one or two .c files from the Evolution
project.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be