Pegasus Mail v4.0 - Status of Pegasus Mail

From:	David Harris 
To:	PM-NEWS@BAMA.UA.EDU 
Subject:	Status of Pegasus Mail v4.0
Date sent:	Tue, 13 Mar 2001 16:32:27 +1300
Mailed using:	Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v4.0, beta 9)

I realize that a couple of possible release points have come and gone since my December posting about the development of Pegasus Mail v4.0, so I think it's high time that I spend a moment bringing you up to date on where we stand at present.

Pegasus Mail v4.0 is currently up to beta 9 of what I expect to be around 20 betas. To date, more than 75,000 lines of code has been added to the program and practically no module is unchanged.

One of the problems I have had to face is that the Pegasus Mail code is now quite venerable - some of it dates from as early as 1991, and a great deal of it simply doesn't scale well. This has meant that the program has been getting harder and harder to maintain over the last couple of years, which is the explanation for the ever longer periods between upgrades. For v4.0, I decided that I simply had to locate and rework as much of the antique code in the program as I could - to give you an example, in the new addressbook interface, not so much as a single line of code could be salvaged from the v3.x project - all of it had to be rewritten, a total of over 10,000 lines so far. The depressing thing about this is that I spend a lot of time feeling as though I have very little to show for the work I have done - but the intangible gain is a program that will be much more maintainable and reliable in the long term.

Unfortunately, a significant side effect of such a major rewriting process is that it's nearly impossible for me to work out how long things are going to take - often, modifying one thing that seems easy on the surface leads to a chain of modifications that quickly become unexpectedly time-consuming. This is why those of you who have approached me asking for estimates of when v4.0 will be available have found me to be either evasive, or inaccurate, or more usually both. In the end, I have only slightly more idea than you when things might actually be ready for release.

But it's not all gloom and uncertainty. :-) I'm comfortable with the general progress towards the overall development targets in v4.0 and believe that it really will be worth the wait, even if that wait is rather longer than I ever expected. At the moment, I am hopeful that by the end of this month I may be able to release a public preview beta with a significant portion of the new functionality in place for you to examine and evaluate - this is my current aim, and I hope you'll bear with me until then.

Cheers!

-- David --


---------------- David Harris -+- Pegasus Mail ----------------------
  Box 5451, Dunedin, New Zealand | e-mail: David.Harris@pmail.gen.nz
           Phone: +64 3 453-6880 | Fax: +64 3 453-6612

Thought for the day:
    Remember, even if you win the rat race - you're still a rat.