[Dovecot] shared authentication

whats the recommended way to share a user auth info between dovecot and postfix? sasldb seems like it could work but nobody really seems to like using the giant mass that is sasl. i also cant find any information on actually getting dovecot to use sasl past the configure options. i looked at timo's patch for postfix to use dovecot-auth but it doesnt apply correctly on the 2.1 branch. so what are people using to share passwords between the two without using the system passwd?