[Dovecot] Configuration file changes

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 01:44, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
> Perhaps some of the confusion is that it looks like you are using
> groups as a way both to encapsulate a group of settings and as a way to
> override inheritence of global settings.  While those things are
> similar it's hard to generalize them by way of nested statements.

Yes .. Well, currently there's only auth group which encapsulates
settings. Although it also allows overriding global settings :) That's a
bit messy. You have to be able to define multiple auth processes - how
would you show that they work differently? Another similiar thing is
namespace configuration which I'll add later.

> At any rate perhaps a different way to accomplish parameter grouping
> would be to define templates and invoke those templates within
> scoped declarations, e.g.:

Ah, yes :) That could be better. More powerful and probably easier to
understand as well.

> I could imagine implementing a "template" as a set of context-free
> tag/value pairs.  When invoked (e.g. via "like") the parser would simply
> note the reference to the template, and eventually parse the tag/value
> pairs when the scope is closed, applying those that had not already
> been specifically set.

It probably should also be possible to add some subgroups in it .. Such
as:

template modular_imap {
  protocol imap {
    mail_use_modules = yes
  }
}

server a {
  like modular_imap
}

Anyway, I think we'd still need to have everything default to root-level
definitions. So that I wouldn't need to add "template standard {" to
beginning of config file. And add "like standard" to every server
definition. Also good for backwards compatibility..

But template certainly replaces the old "group".