Dovecot and Postfix integration

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday 18 January 2008 04:41, Soren Hansen wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2008 at 07:16:05PM +0100, Ante Karamatić wrote:
> > As some of you know, I've been working on better out-of-the-box
> > dovecot and postfix integration in Ubuntu.
>
> \o/
>
> > Status of the work is at:
> >
> > https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dovecot/+bug/164837
> >
> > We kind of all agreed on having this integrated trough task in tasksel.
> > Last debdiff provided there should be enough for this kind of setup.
>
> I'm still not convinved this is the right approach.
>
> > Since these are all good changes for everybody, there are ideas on
> > moving this out of tasksel and into packages. This way everybody would
> > benefit from our changes.
>
> Yes.
>
> > I didn't do anything since last debdiff, so I would like to hear pros
> > and cons that that last idea (moving everything into packages).
> > Basically, if someone would install postfix, he automatically would
> > get dovecot-common (note that this isn't IMAP/POP3 daemon, but a SASL
> > component) and preconfigured system for Maildir.
>
> I'm not sure about switching to Maildir. I definitely think Maildir is a
> major improvement over mbox, but I'm worried too many things still
> depend on /var/spool/mail/$USERNAME to be where the user's mail is at. I
> could be totally wrong, but we need to check it.

I think that's equally true for mbox, so I don't think it argues either way 
for the format (I like the idea of checking it).

> If we focus on the SASL stuff for a little bit, IIRC my last proposal
> was to make postfix's init script do something like:
>
> if [ -x /usr/sbin/dovecot ]
> then
>     # Use http://pastebin.ubuntu-nl.org/46677/ to grab the socket path
>     if [ ! -e /etc/postfix/dovecot_sasl_configured ]
>     then
>         # Set the SASL stuff up (like in your debdiff)
>         postconf -e 'blahblah'
>     else
>         SASL_SOCKET="`parsestuff "auth default" "socket" "client" "path"`"
>         mount -o bind "${SASL_SOCKET}" /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
>     fi
> fi
>
> How does that look?

I'm fairly certain I don't like the idea of having the init script edit 
main.cf.  Perhaps some similar magic could be added to the dovecot postinst?  
Having the init mess with main.cf seems risky and fragile (I could be totally 
wrong on this, it's just a gut feel).

Lamont and I recently had a discussion on Postfix transition from Postfix 2.4 
to 2.5 in Hardy.  Weitse has said he plans another patch update for Postfix 
2.4 just after Postfix 2.5 is released.  We currently have Postfix 2.4 in the 
release pocket for Gutsy and in backports for Dapper/Edgy/Feisty (plus or 
minus .1 you can run the same Postfix on every Ubuntu release from an 
official (yes, I know not all commercially supported) Ubuntu repository).

Our plan is to not bring Postfix 2.5 into Hardy as soon as it's released, but 
to wait for this last Postfix 2.4 bug fix, upload that to Hardy and, after 
suitable testing, backport it to Dapper/Edgy/Feisty/Gutsy (Dapper will need a 
source backport due to libdb transition to 4.6), and then bring Postfix 2.5 
into Hardy.

Please hold off on any experimental changes to the Postfix package until 
Postfix 2.5 lands.

Scott K