[Dovecot] Three oddities

[Bob Hall]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 11:34:05PM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003, at 22:24 Europe/Helsinki, Bob Hall wrote:
> >I'm clueless on this. What does /proc/pid/pwd symlink do? Can you give
> >an example from the command line?
> 
> It would just show current directory of the process. Like:
> 
> lrwxrwxrwx    1 cras     cras            0 2003-08-20 23:25 cwd -> 
> /home/cras
 
OK, I'll google a bit and see if I can educate myself on this.
 
> >>>user_global_uid, then login fails. From maillog:
> >>>Aug 20 03:15:15 kongemord dovecot: Logins with UID 0 not permitted
> >>>(user rjhjr)
> >>
> >>Yes, the error message could be better.
> >
> >Actually, that error message was fine. In combination with the
> >documentation, it made it clear what the problem was. That's what
> >error messages are supposed to do; point you to something that is
> >covered in the documentation.
> 
> Yes, but "no UID given" isn't really same as "UID 0". :)

"no UID given" would be appropriate if Dovecot was ignoring the 
LDAP-supplied values and supplying no default UID. You know what 
Dovecot does better than I do, but it appears as if Dovecot was 
trying to use a UID; that of root. Since LDAP wasn't suppling 
UID 0, I knew the problem was with Dovecot, which led me to the 
config files. Had the message been "no UID given", I would have 
wasted time trying to figure out why Dovecot wasn't getting a UID. 

Putting it differently, an error message should tell you, as 
briefly as possible, exactly what triggered it, without 
explaining it. Explanations belong in the documentation. The 
error message should be at the same level as the documentation; 
e.g if you don't document your procedure calls, the error message 
shouldn't contain the procedure call that triggered it. (Actually, 
it can, but that's for the programmers, not the users.) The user 
should be able to take words or phrases from the error message and 
use them to search the documentation. "UID 0" meets those criteria, 
but "no UID given" is an explanation.
 
> One of the reasons I haven't yet really bothered to write much is 
> because Dovecot is just now changing a lot. Configuration file syntax 
> changes, namespaces were added, indexes work differently than before .. 
> what else ..

No programming project is ever finished. The developers just get tired 
and drift away. If you wait for an obvious stopping point to write 
documentation, you'll wait for ever.  
 
> >I want to second the people in other threads who suggested
> >setting up some sort of collaborative documentation project.
> 
> Well, I installed MoinMoin Wiki, but didn't yet look much into it. I 
> guess I should at least remove most of the default pages. There's a lot 
> of german text.
> 
> http://dovecot.procontrol.fi/dovewiki/

Looks good in lynx. I'll try Mozilla when I have time. Programming is 
fun, writing documentation is boring. Keep the fun/boring ratio as 
high as possible. 

Bob