[Dovecot] best choice of user database file to work with postfix

[Phil Howard]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Ed W <lists at wildgooses.com> wrote:

> P.S.  The "idiot" who kept breaking the plain text format file in my
> original setup was .... da da ... me ... So given I think of myself as
> reasonably technical, I would claim that text format "databases" are way
> more fragile than you might expect.... (good luck getting a non technical
> user not to break the text format file from time to time...)
>

But this is more an issue of exposing the system to human failure than it is
a choice of using a flat file.  If the flat file is generated by some other
system, and maybe merged with other data, and never handled by a human
except in extraordinary situations, it should be fine.  This is used as a
justification for XML being a text format (that a human can read it and even
edit it, in non-routine situations).

FYI, I have done hand editing of /etc/{group,passwd,shadow} to add users.
So far I've never killed root.  I still have to at times.  Most recently I
did so with Ubuntu because the user management tool couldn't get it right (I
needed a specific UID/GID arrangement for compatibility with other systems,
and the GUI tool refused ... it would let me do one or the other, but not
both at the same time).