On 2012-07-22 5:53 AM, Hans J. Albertsson > As an example, to wit, in the
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Public doc, there's a line
"In the above example, you would then create Maildir mailboxes under the /var/mail/public/ directory."
and a colour plate plate showing a directory listing.
# ls -la /var/mail/public/ drwxr-s--- 1 root mail 0 2007-03-19 03:12 . drwxrws--- 1 root mail 0 2007-03-19 03:12 .lkml drwxrws--- 1 root mail 0 2007-03-19 03:12 .bugtraq -rw-rw---- 1 root mail 0 2007-03-19 03:12 dovecot-shared
I am guessing that this means I'm supposed to do mkdir dovecot-shared inside /var/mail/public.
Since it isn't listed as a directory, I'm confused as to why would you guess that?
dovecot-shared is a FILE, not a directory.
The 3rd line below that example on that page specifically says:
"The dovecot-shared FILE..."
It seems to me that you aren't even bothering to read these docs, andit is more like all you want to do is complain that there is nothing already written holding your hand through every possible config that you want to accomplish.
Dovecot is primarily written by one guy (Timo), and he does a remarkable job of both coding and documenting dovecot on the wiki, as well as answering support questions here on the list, and while sometimes there are a few days before he answers many questions, serious bug reports generally get prompt attention, and I don't think I've ever seen him not respond to a question in time.
There is no doubt that dovecot could really use some good, experienced technical writers that could help Timo with documenting dovecot to make it easier to learn by someone new to it, and I'm sure he would welcome that help - are you volunteering?
Sorry if I'm being horridly difficult, but I think (from experiencing it as a user) dovecot is too good not to have proper tutorials and howtos.
Well, dovecot's intended audience isn't a 'user', it is experienced system/mail admins, but if you are volunteering to help Timo (and the dovecot community) out by improving the wiki documentation and/or creating some of these HowTos from the perspective of someone totally new to dovecot (and maybe even IMAP servers in general), then I am quite certain that Timo will welcome such help.
And as for documentation in the form of books, you cannot compare dovecot to postfix in this regard.
Postfix is one of the most mature, stable projects out there - it's core functionality basically never changes (only the rare bug fixes), and major new features are pretty rare too, so even books written 8 years ago are still fairly relevant (and generally are only missing the new features).
With dovecot, things are very different. It is still very young and changing rapidly, and probably will continue to do so as Timo adds new features on his ToDo list. A book written even a year ago would not have much use to someone using the current version today. As it matures and features stabilize, this will change, and I'm hopeful that in a year or two, dovecot will stabilize to the point that some of the talented book writers out there will take on such a huge project - but none of them want to do that right now because dovecot is such a fast moving target.
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Best regards,
Charles