Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
> there is no prospect of releasing trunk without Noel's active support.
I hope that's not actually the case, but regardless, what does the PMC think
of the following?
Trunk is simply not trustworthy. Anyone who would consider releasing from
trunk would do little to improve my opinion of said person's competence to
make that judgement. Frankly, I consider a "milestone" from trunk to be
less than a bad joke, and would vote -1 on the grounds that no one can
consider trunk even close to being supportable. You and Danny have recently
said almost the same thing about trunk being unsupportable. So what is the
point of a milestone? We already do nightly builds. Anyone who wants to
jump off a mountain in the dark without a parachute and pray for the best is
invited to try the nightly builds.
That said, there are several things that we could do it improve trust in the
code. One is the plan that we had discussed at ApacheCon: start from known
good code -- the JAMES 2.3.x codebase -- and incrementally merge parts of
trunk into it as they are reviewed. I consider that to be a good and viable
option, and would have started on that already were it not for my own
server's failure last week, and the SVN issues this week.
Second is to get people to review trunk en masse. I don't consider that
likely, but if everyone wants to give it a shot, I'm willing to be
surprised.
However, simply reviewing the code won't come even remotely close to cutting
it. One reason why the trusted code is trusted isn't just that it has been
reviewed, but that it has been EXTENSIVELY tested in production over a long
span of time.
So regardless of which approach we take, and certainly crucial to any
attempt to evaluate the code quality of trunk, we need to hammer at the
build. And not just within a sanitized cleanroom network, which is what
prevented Stefano from seeing the problems staring those of us who actually
use JAMES in the face.
So what I propose is that we setup a JAMES zone, and start to deploy JAMES
in that zone. That will be published in the DNS, and quite shortly we
should start to see a lot of connections coming to it as millions of
spambots start to exercise JAMES for us. So we'll have a built-in load test
running, courtesy of the botnets, and we can just watch the build work or
crash in flames without any concern for lost messages. We will need to be
careful to initially disable the ability to send mail, and open it up very
carefully to make sure that we don't accidentally create a relay of any
kind. We could, for example, setup an SMTPS handler, and allow PMC members
to send via it, or alternatively, allow relaying only when the connection
comes from p.a.o.
This would be a really good thing for helping us to improve trust in the
code, both now and as it evolves.
--- Noel
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