[Dovecot] Imap folders missing after updating

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Fred Harris <frharris27 at yahoo.com>:

> It's getting to be a very big problem with open source software.

What is?  Users who don't know what they are doing and can't be
bothered to learn and/or follow "best practices" or commons sense?

> Andrew Morton who's the lead maintainer of the Linux production   
> kernel has come out claiming that the kernel is getting too buggy.

Unrelated.

> You may not call changing the name of a dependency a bug, but it   
> certainly manifests itself as one.

You may not consider yourself a bug, but you might certainly manifest
as one ;) (Ouch, that should get me some flames!)

> MS desktop clients update themselves pretty seemlessly.  Servers are  
>  getting to that level pretty quickly as well.

Yes, with production software, that is expected.

> I'm fighting an  uphill battle trying convince my clients and peers  
> to adopt open  source software and they ask me why?  Software that  
> updates itself  verses surely Linux hacks who put people down  
> because they don't  want to follow a complex 20 step process that's  
> documented in 15  different places.

Released production software that has been out for a decade versus a
product that hasn't even seen a 1.0 release yet?  Surely you don't
expect them to be equal in terms of upgrade support!

> There's only a limited amount of space for various open source   
> applications.  They're pretty much commercial ventures now.

That hardely even makes sense.

> There's a big push among packages like Fedora and Debian to

Fedora and Debian are distributions, not packages.  Or maybe you
meant "packagers" instead?

> virtualize installations with seemless state archival, recovery, and  
>  transitions.  I suppose that may be more of an issue for the   
> packager than the software developer.  I predict that the packages   
> that seemlessly update state across versions will be the only ones   
> that exist in the future.

Yeah, too bad there aren't many of those in the server world yet.
If you think there are, you haven't tried upgrading Microsoft's
large server applications (e.g. Exchange) much.

> I guess administrators can make themselves feel important and smart   
> by spending days messing with an update that should really only take  
>  a couple of hours, or maybe not even that long.

No. We make ourselves feel important and smart by doing due dillagence
first, following best practices, and accomplishing the upgrade in a
couple of hours instead of spending days doing it.

Come on folks.  If you want "seemless" (sic) support, don't use
pre-lease software.  Simple as that.  Most pre-release software
will have major changes and backwards compatability breaks (not
to mention bugs and such). That is just a fact of life in development.

I'm not trying to knock Timo or dovecot.  They are both great.  I'm
not even trying to knock those who use or depend on pre-release software
(I do, with clamav for example).  But those who don't know what they
are doing should stay clear.

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!