[Dovecot] 1.0.rc16 released

[Bill Cole]

At 5:46 PM +0200 1/5/07, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>http://dovecot.org/releases/dovecot-1.0.rc16.tar.gz
>http://dovecot.org/releases/dovecot-1.0.rc16.tar.gz.sig
>
>If you've had problems with getting errors about index files 
>sometimes being corrupted, please try if this release fixes it. If 
>you've reported any bugs that this release hasn't fixed, please 
>report them again so I know they still didn't get fixed and that I 
>didn't forget them.


[...]

>	* Maildir: We're using rename() to move files from tmp/ to new/ now.
>	  See http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir -> "Issues with
>	  the specification" for reasoning why this is safe. This makes saving
>	  mails faster, and also makes Dovecot usable with Mac OS X's HFS+
>	  (after you also set dotlock_use_excl=yes, see below).
>
>	+ Added dotlock_use_excl setting. If enabled, dotlocks are created
>	  directly using O_EXCL flag, instead of by creating a temporary file
>	  which is hardlinked. O_EXCL is faster, but may not work with NFS.


Can you expand on this?

I have been running Dovecot on a MacOS 10.4 PPC machine with Maildir 
on local (HFS+) disk for some time and have had intermittent and 
hard-to-characterize problems that manifest themselves as clients 
(Eudora, Palm VersaMail, and Outlook) timing out and hanging as one 
tries to move messages between mailboxes in the same account. The 
cargo-cult approach I've used to eliminate the hangs has been 
unsatisfying (cycle all clients and Dovecot, remove index files and 
temp files in mailbox directories) but even with rawlogging I have 
been unable to nail down the source of the trouble definitively. It 
looks like maybe bad index files or maybe some sort of locking issue, 
but the logs don't show anything other than the clients timing out 
and dropping connections.

I don't understand the description of those rc16 changes because it 
seems like dotlocking would be irrelevant for Maildir anyway. Should 
I set dotlock_use_excl=yes even though I'm using fcntl?


-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com