[Dovecot] Re: 1.0 RC1 status

[Mark Nienberg]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 11:33 -0700, Mark Nienberg wrote:
>> beta 9 still has a permissions problem when a user creates a new folder in a public 
>> namespace.  The file dovecot-shared is used to assign permissions and ownership for 
>> new files, but not for new directories.
>>
>> In the example below, the public directory .myTest was created by user mark.  Other 
>> users cannot read it.  All users are in the group Everyone.  These are real system 
>> users.
>>
>> [root at tesla Maildir]# ls -la /home/public/Maildir/
>> total 103k
>> drwxrws--- 11 dovecot Everyone 4.1k Jun 20 11:17 ./
>> drwxrwxrwx  3 root    root     4.1k Jun  7 09:15 ../
>> drwxrws---  2 dovecot Everyone  13k May 24 14:43 cur/
>> -rw-rw----  1 dovecot Everyone    0 May 12 13:46 dovecot-shared
>> drwx--S---  5 mark    Everyone 4.1k Jun 20 11:17 .myTest/
>> drwxrws---  2 dovecot Everyone 4.1k May 24 14:44 new/
>> drwxrws---  2 dovecot Everyone 4.1k May 19 17:48 tmp/
> 
> Each created folder is supposed to have their own dovecot-shared file.
> Having the dovecot-shared in here makes it used only for INBOX, nothing
> else.

The permission problem is for the new folder itself (.myTest in this example).  It 
should be created with group read/write privileges since it is in a public namespace. 
  Alternatively, it should be created with group privileges of the dovecot-shared folder.

> Also if you create new folders the dovecot-shared file isn't copied or
> anything else. So you always have to create it manually for each shared
> folder..

With respect, you are wrong about that.  Dovecot does create a copy of dovecot-shared 
in the new folder.  In the example above, inside the .myTest directory is another 
dovecot-shared file, and I didn't create it, dovecot did!  The administrator need 
only create dovecot-shared once in the parent folder.  All new subfolders created by 
users inherit a copy.  It already works.

> I don't think I'm going to change this behavior before writing proper
> shared folder support, sometimes after v1.0.

I'm not sure what you mean by proper support.  All I really need is something 
equivalent to UW-IMAP public folders.  It seems to me dovecot already does that and 
has the added improvement of allowing each user to maintain his own index file.  The 
only problem I've seen is the minor permissions issue described above.  I'm still 
testing, with plans to convert our production server next weekend.

Mark