[Dovecot] dovecot and ntp: Fatal: Time just moved backwards

[Matthijs Kooijman]

Hi Eugene,

> But really, all this leads is that admin has to detect the dovecot  
> termination and simply go and restart it manually -- after some bad  
> thoughts.
During normal operation, on 99% of the hosts, the clock should never need to
leap backwards. So if that ever happens, it seems fine for dovecot to stop and
require admin intervention. This is perhaps not ideal, but it sure beats
dovecot making mails disappear or doing other funky and undefined stuff.

If you happen to have a system on which this is in fact common, then you
should find some way to deal with this yourself, preferably by not making the
time leap backwards :-)

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any improvements to handle this in dovecot,
but I think it's not so trivial to handle this properly, without risking data
loss (as Timo pointed out, immediately restarting is not really helping, since
you'll still be running in the past. AFAIU, dovecot should at least wait
with restarting until the backwards leap time has passed again, which seems
rather non-trivial to implement).

Gr.

Matthijs
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