fedora-d-rh] Re: rawhide report: 20040109 changes

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Elliot Lee wrote:

> The 'imap' package had file conflicts with cyrus-imapd, and dovecot is 
> there if you want to use it, so I removed UW imap.

Hmmm -- Isn't either 'alternatives' and a meta-package
Provides of pop-server and imap-server; or a set of Conflicts:
present the better pair of solution options to a file 
conflicts issue?

  Of the three pop/imap servers: UW imap, cyrus-imapd and
dovecot, only UW imap is in the RHEL-3 series.  That means it
carries a support horizon of several years by Red Hat
engineering.  Considering this with the concomitant and oft'
repeated commitment for releasing source packaging by Red Hat
folk, a built in 'backstop' exists so Fedora does not end up
without a rather essential server, and still keeps a trivial 
update path.

 The most recent patch in the 'fedora' sources to UW-imap 
dates from Mar 13  2003 as imap.pamd -- scarcely a big 
maintenance headache.

 This doesn't mean that UW-imap is preferred and should live
forever in the 'shipping' Fedora (I have lived with packages
coming and going through Deprecation through namy cycles).  
But neither does it mean such a package should be casually
discarded and removed from RawHide before a clean transition
path to one of the alternatives exists.

Please consider replacing it in RawHide, if only as the
current variant from the RHEL series.  Who knows, it just
might produce a bugreports, headsup issue soptting and
solutions for the Enterprise side by people like me who have
long tested and filed bugs against RawHide items.  ;)

- Russ Herrold