Requirements

Testers should be comfortable with:

  • offlineimap
  • git
  • bug reporting

Release cycles

All new patches are applied to the branch called next in the official repository.

Once enough patches are merged and instead of releasing the next stable, maintainers notify the testers that a new version will be released soon. The code is freezed for some time so that the testers can check the code and report issues.

Some testers might rather make near from continous testing by checking almost each patches. However, this way of working should be dedicated to the most advanced users. If you don’t know Python and can’t recover from bad issues, you should not blindly work on the next branch.

You should really read our Git documentation once to get a good understanding of our way of working with the official sources.

Environment for the testers

In order to avoid any conflicts, offlineimap installations from ditribution packages and other manual installations should be removed.

To avoid the pain of re-installing offlineimap you might like to run it from your local git sources directly.

To avoid most of the strongest issues, it’s highly recommended to correctly backup offlineimap.

Other notes

Please, work in the open as much as possible. In rare cases, it’s possible to ping the maintainers directly so they can privately work on your issues. Notice that some other trusted contributors might be requested to help, too.

A note to OSX / homebrew users: when you install offlineimap using the --HEAD option, the head of the git repo gets installed - so testing is quite easy.