[Dovecot] dovecot 2.1 breaks FTS + pre-auth?

[Timo Sirainen]

On 31.3.2012, at 18.38, dm-list-email-dovecot at scs.stanford.edu wrote:

> Hi.  I use dovecot in the simplest possible way, as an IMAP server in
> pre-auth mode over ssh or just locally over a unix-domain socket
> (e.g., with offlineimap, which runs much faster using dovecot for the
> local message store).  Ideally I would like to avoid running any extra
> daemons or setting up anything as root.  Until recently, this has
> worked fine by just setting the CONFIG_FILE environment variable to
> something in my home directory.

You can run Dovecot without root: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/Rootless

> Full text search used to work just fine with this configuration, and
> still does on a machine I have running dovecot 2.0.13.  However, on
> the machine with 2.1, I get errors about /var/run/dovecot/index not
> existing.
> 
> $ printf "a select INBOX\nb search text xyzzy\nc logout\n" \
>    | /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
> * PREAUTH [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE SORT SORT=DISPLAY THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=REFS MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT CHILDREN NAMESPACE UIDPLUS LIST-EXTENDED I18NLEVEL=1 CONDSTORE QRESYNC ESEARCH ESORT SEARCHRES WITHIN CONTEXT=SEARCH LIST-STATUS SPECIAL-USE] Logged in as dm
> imap(dm): Error: net_connect_unix(/var/run/dovecot/indexer) failed: No such file or directory

I looked at the code and looks like there is no easy way to make it work the old way. The new way is the only way to make fts-lucene work reliably, and it's also better for fts-solr. And fts-squat is really on its way out to die.