[Dovecot] DoveCot IMAP and "inconsistent state" messages

[Ed W]

Joseba Torre wrote:
> Hi,
>
> El Martes, 1 de Abril de 2008 a las 04:14, Bill Cole escribió:
>   
>> That's a question about the competence of the people maintaining that
>> repository. Presumably these would be the people who blessed a
>> pre-release version of Dovecot almost 18 months ago, in a period when
>> such versions were being released every few days *due to bugs*, and
>> who have not updated their build at any time since. It seems to me
>> that these are not people who should be tasked or trusted with being
>> the gatekeepers of software deployment, as that seems to be
>> demonstrably beyond their competence.
>>     
>
> RedHat (and CentOS) has his own policy about releases, and more or less it 
> is: "no update will break a working instalation". So they try to port any 
> security patches to their running versions -and this is a lot of work, they 
> have their own forked version of almost any package!-, but almost never add 
> any new funcionality. This policy has one great point: it's easy to 
> understand, and it gives few surprises. And this is great most of the times.
>
> Pre-1.0 Dovecot is the kind of software that doesn't fit well in that policy: 
> a lot of changes, and no standard stable version. So they chose one 
> version -1.0rc15 in this case-, because their other option was not including 
> dovecot. That's exactly why I'm compiling dovecot from source, but I usually 
> like the default policy.
>
> Aaaaaaaaaagur.
>   

I guess it will drawn groans, but this is largely the reason that I 
chose Gentoo for my server distros. 

Roughly speaking with most main distros you get a "stuck in stone" set 
of packages + bug fixes for those packages each week.  This causes few 
surprises, but it means that if you need some new feature you are 
immediately into compiling from source.  Additionally big version 
upgrades seem to be approximately once a year and it appears in most 
cases this is a take the server down, upgrade it, bring it up and check 
the configs kind of process (ie fairly major)

Gentoo goes the other way - everything remains permanently unstable (if 
you want to think in those terms).  Every time you upgrade you get the 
latest and greatest versions...  There is a package masking process so 
that there isn't "too" much suprise with stuff breaking and local 
patches are applied to keep upgrades as simple as possible.  This falls 
somewhere between a Redhat weekly upgrade kind of stability and a redhat 
"operating system version upgrade" experience - ie I wouldn't trust it 
to run unattended every sunday without someone watching it, yet on the 
other hand I can take a year old server and upgrade all the software on 
it to latest stable in an hour without (usually) taking it down. 

Pays your money and takes your choice I guess...  Suits my needs though 
(I often need new features and up to date software)

Ed W