[Dovecot] Dovecot's brittle configuration syntax

[Timo Sirainen]

On 28.11.2013, at 12.22, Kai Hendry <hendry at dabase.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> Whilst trying to come up with a minimal configuration for Dovecot:
> http://dabase.com/blog/Minimal_Dovecot/
> 
> I noticed the configuration syntax is a bit admin unfriendly. It's easy
> to get an infamous Error code 89.

If Dovecot can’t parse the configuration file, it writes the error message to stderr. I’d say it’s a systemd problem if it hides the error. Perhaps Dovecot could also log the error to the mail syslog, but that won’t really help people who have configured the logging differently. (And since Dovecot can’t parse the config, it can’t read where it should log the error.)

> Is there any back story to the grammar or language this configuration is
> in?

I guess it would be ok to allow section { key = value } in one line. I just haven’t felt the need to spend time on that. Feel free to send a patch.

> I wouldn't mind editing the wiki if I had permission to so and ideally
> via a git backend. http://ikiwiki.info/ or without the Web interface
> http://laktek.github.io/punch/ is good. Or even my low tech wiki
> https://github.com/kaihendry/wordsister

Changing the wiki software now would be a huge task. Besides converting the wiki text itself, you’d also need to write man page -> wiki conversion and wiki -> .txt conversions and I think there are some other things as well. Wiki can still be changed by anyone, as it says you can get the captcha answer by email. (I started having to revert wiki spam daily and changing the captcha only helped for a few days.)

> I hope it's fixed. Is there a bug tracker btw?
> 
> I just see this proposal here:
> http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-January/018786.html

I’m planning on having a public bug tracker where issues can be tracked, but only added by some admins (to avoid the 3th problem in the link above). But this requires my workload to drop. Which it almost certainly will during the next year.