I've finally upgraded to 1.0.rc21. If I run "dovecot --log-error", then dovecot fails to start. The following appears in the log:
Feb 5 10:54:00 taurus1 dovecot: Dovecot v1.0.rc21 starting up Feb 5 10:54:00 taurus1 dovecot: This is Dovecot's error log
Without --log-error, it will start up fine from command-line.
Dovecot still fails to start, as near as I can tell, in the specific condition that it is being started from a non-interactive shell and there is a mail_plugin set in "protocol imap". mail plugins set for pop or lda do not cause this problem. The failure to start appears in only two instances that I can see: on boot, or by a monitoring script if dovecot crashes, or, since I haven't seen dovecot die, when I manually stop it to see if the monitoring program will restart it.
With the above problem, if the init script has --log-error when I try to make the monitoring program restart dovecot, then nothing still gets logged.
-- Marshal Newrock, Ideal Solution LLC http://www.idealso.com