User talk:Wietse venema

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Latest release version
Wietse, for your edification, the infobox parameter "latest release version" should contain the latest version of the most recent stable branch of the software. Other stable versions can be mentioned in the text. Mind matrix  21:46, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Expectations versus reality
Sorry, I see a conflict between expectations and reality.

With ordinary software, people have come to expect that only the "highest" release version is "good", and that all "lower" release versions are "bad" because they contain security holes.

In other words, ordinary software has effectively only one release (the latest).

With Postfix, this expectation is not just wrong, the reality is exactly the other way around. There are multiple "good" Postfix releases. The Postfix release number is not an indicator for quality. Instead, the release number is an indicator for the available feature set.

The latest "lower" stable releases, 2.4.14 and 2.5.10 from March 22 2010, are the "best" Postfix releases. They contain all applicable errata from "higher" release versions. The "lower" release versions are the most secure because they do not contain recent code that has more bugs.

Therefore, if we must surrender to the "list only one stable release" dogma, then we should list Postfix 2.4.14 or 2.5.10 as the latest stable release in the sidebar, if only because they were released later than the 2.6.6 one.

Alternatively, we could address the limitations of the dogma, and allow for the possibility that a system can have more than one "good" stable release version. In the case of Postfix, these are called supported legacy releases, With other software, there could be multiple supported parallel variants for other reasons. For example, there used to be "conventional" and "trusted" versions of the same operating system that offered the same basic system interfaces, but that differed in the presence or absence of security auditing facilities.

Wietse venema (talk) 15:45, 4 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Wietse, I completely forgot about this discussion. My apologies.
 * To address your concern, it's not so much dogma as it is the limitations of pre-formatted templates used for creating infoboxes on Wikipedia. To ensure correct formatting, the template requires one entry. I've added a history section to the article, currently just a table of releases from 2.5.0 onward. You can elaborate about version stability and legacy support in that section. As the table may become quite long, a possibility is to split the release history into its own article (as is done with History of FreeBSD, for example), and retain a subset in the main article for the latest releases from each branch (or any supported stable and legacy releases).
 * As an aside, the Postfix announcements page needs a small tweak - releases for 2011 and 2012 are merged under 2011. Mind  matrix  23:02, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. I have fixed the announcements page which seems to have suffered from tunnel vision. I don't think it makes sense to have the full release history on the Postfix(software) page; my idea was to list only the few supported ones. However the current format of release/preview is acceptable. It's more urgent to make time to fix the text.

Wietse venema (talk) 00:13, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

The disclaimer about lack of supporting citations
Over the past 4 weeks or so I restructured most of the text, and added pointers to other Wikipedia pages that cover related topics. I wonder if the disclaimer is still needed at this point. Wietse venema (talk) 18:07, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

August 2013
Welcome to Wikipedia. We welcome and appreciate your contributions, including your edits to Postfix (software), but we cannot accept original research. Original research also encompasses combining published sources in a way to imply something that none of them explicitly say. Please be prepared to cite a reliable source for all of your contributions. Thank you. Kiko4564 (talk) 22:51, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Multiple stable releases, revisited
Hi again. I just discovered a template created a few months ago that may be of use to you. It is Multiple stable software releases, which enables the insertion of (as the name suggests) multiple stable software release versions into an infobox. The documentation cites the example of Opera Mini (which has stable versions for different OSes), the entries for which are stored in Template:Multiple stable software releases/Opera Mini. I think this is exactly what you were looking for in 2010 (based on our discussion above). If so, use the Opera Mini template as a guide to create Template:Multiple stable software releases/Postfix, update the infobox in the article to use, and move the latest* parameters to the template as appropriate, using LSR and LPR. I hope this helps! Mind matrix  17:03, 16 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I took a quick look, and the "documentation" (actually an example) says this template is "intended for software that is differently versioned from platform to platform". Postfix versions are not tied to any particular OS or hardware platform, so maybe I can try to specify "Postfix majorversion.minorversion" where Opera Mini has "Blackberry", "Symbian", etc. Do you know if there is "real documentation" for how these templates are supposed to be used? There is a lot of unexplained content in the Opera Mini template source. Wietse venema (talk) 18:49, 16 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, many templates have weak documentation, if any. This template was created in April, and apparently only used on two articles so far, so little attention has been paid to it. I had meant to suggest what you stated about specifying versions for Postfix, so I'd just go with that. As far as the template is concerned, each entry has two components: the first is, which in your case you could set to "Postfix 2.8" etc. (or whatever format you choose); the second is LSR or LPR as appropriate.   would be set to "Postfix (software)", and the other parameters are fairly straightforward, I think. The contents in the section are relevant to the template only, and are not transcluded into the pages using the template (ie - Category:Latest stable software release templates won't show up in Postfix (software) by using the template).  Mind  matrix  21:04, 16 November 2014 (UTC)


 * After further investigation, I found that Multiple stable software releases is currently only implemented in the Infobox web browser template, so you'll have to wait to use it until it's added to Infobox software. This may take some time, as Infobox software is transcluded by over 11,000 articles, so changes to it are made with great care to ensure there's no broken transclusions. I'll try to find someone interested in making this change, or maybe make it myself, but it'll take some time. Mind  matrix  21:12, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

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