Migrating to Dovecot EE

[Sven Hartge]

Philipp Resch <philipp at devh.de> wrote:

> I am currently running dovecot 2.2.9 on my Debian Wheezy system.  As
> this version is a bit outdated and I'm not too keen on compiling
> Dovecot myself I was thinking about moving to the Dovecot EE
> repository. I already have access to the repository, and now before I
> starting "apt-getting" all kinds of packages: What would be the best
> way on moving to the Dovecot EE repository? Just doing an apt-get
> install dovecot-ee? Will it replace the current version? Or should the
> old version be removed before installing the new one?  Has anyone ever
> done this and has some advice for me?

I've done it like this:

1) backup /etc/dovecot
2) purge old dovecot packages
   This removes all dovecot internal users, but do not worry, they
   will be recreated by the dovecot-ee packages.
   This also deletes all config files, but you have a backup from step 1.
3) install dovecot-ee packages
4) put config files from backup back to /etc/dovecot

Beware: the pacakge system allows you to replace the old dovecot
packages with the dovecot-ee packages, but due to the way the Debian
package system works, this will wreck your dovecot-configuration once
you finally purge the old packages, because then this also purges the
old config files and deletes the dovecot-internal users (like dovenull).

This is why it is very important to _first_ delete _and_ purge the old
packages before installation of the dovecot-ee packages.

Grüße,
Sven.

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.