Re: ognus

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:

> Certainly things after 5.8.7 don't look too stable and 5.8.7 was
> apparently released with mail-source-delete-incoming turned off, for
> instance, even if there's notthing else seriously wrong with it.

5.8.7 has multiple outstanding bugs, some of which are just annoying
(random failures to decode format=flowed that go away when I peer at them
funny, the random inclusion of NNTP responses in the article headers, some
weird slowness when only a few newsgroups have additional articles when
you press 'g') and some of which seem more serious (complete inability to
encode some corrupted types of messages with non-ASCII characters that I
run into when forwarding spam ranging from a whole sequence of odd
"message has unknown characters" questions to aborting errors about
functions being called with the wrong numbers of arguments).

I've reported some of these to this list.  I tried using the bug-reporting
command and discovered that it included in the e-mail message tons of
information that I consider private, such as my entire split ruleset, so
that was a bit of a non-starter.  Some of the rest I can't reproduce well
enough to generate a bug report for, although I'll give it another try
when I run into a good test case.

> You might think or hope that.  You might hope that everybody with CVS
> write access would have an assignment on file and that no-one else
> checked in anything dubious.  If you were Gerd or me, you'd be
> disappointed and waste a lot of time on the issue.

> rms was right to worry about the situation more than I did previously.

It's staggeringly difficult to run a successful free software project with
many contributors and the GNU copyright submission rules.  I'm very
impressed by those people who manage it; I know from trying to manage INN
development that it would be a complete non-starter for us.  This isn't a
complaint; I know why they exist.  But it's really bloody hard.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>