[Dovecot] Configuration file changes

[Amelia A Lewis]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 03:41:42PM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>1. Simply provide default settings for any subgroups without doing
>anything themselves:
>
>2. Are servers themselves, providing defaults for subgroups:
>
>3. Belong to same server instance, but use different settings for
>different users:
>

Time to make an appeal.

One of the great advantages of Dovecot, currently, is ease of configuration. 
It's pretty straightforward, even though it's got a good bit of flexibility.

The examples that you give above (which I snipped) are ... kinda
frightening.  And it raises some questions about Yet Another Configuration
Language and Parser.

So.  If it's possible to define the configuration files as simple unix
config files/property files (name value pairs), I say do that.  Postfix
manages pretty well with that, plus external maps.  Uses more than one file,
keeping the configuration in a directory.

If there will only be one file, with sections, maybe consider just using ini
file style?  Ugly, yes, but familiar.

If it's going to be heavily structured, as the example seemed to indicate,
could you *please* consider using stuff designed to handle that sort of
heavy structuring?  *sigh*  I realize that you hate XML, but it's starting
to look like another markup format.  Maybe look at YAML?  If you're
completely opposed to using that, then maybe try really, really hard to make
it look as much like a Bind 8/9 named.conf file as possible?

I realize that there are some very complex setups that are going to need
interesting kinds of work.  It would be nice, though, if there were some
fairly simple way of configuring them, something that scales up ... and
down, so that relatively simple installations don't have to learn something
as complex as sendmial.cf to bring up an imap server.

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own.  It seems rather
like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something,
or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write.  It should be a
by-product, not a thing in itself.  Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.
                -- Merlin, son of Corwin, Prince of Chaos (Roger Zelazny)