On 31.1.2012, at 2.03, Joseph Tam wrote:

On Mon, 30 Jan 2012, dovecot-request@dovecot.org wrote:

...

So, I was thinking about adding doveadm commands to explicitly tell Dovecot about the mountpoints that it needs to care about. When no mountpoints are defined Dovecot would behave as it does now.

Maybe I don't understand the subtlety of your question, but are you trying to disambiguate between a mounted filesytem and a failed mount that presents the underlying filesystem (which looks like an uninitilized index directory)?

Yes. A mounted filesystem where a directory doesn't exist vs. accidentally unmounted filesystem.

Couldn't you write some cookie file "/mount/.../dovecot-data-root/.dovemount", whose existence will tell you whether the FS is mounted without trying to find the mount root.

This would require that existing installations create such a file or start failing after upgrade. Or that it's made optional and most people wouldn't use this functionality at all.. And I'm sure many people with a single filesystem wouldn't be all that happy creating /.dovemount or /home/.dovemount or such files.