Noel Butler writes:

I build from sources all key daemon software anyway, package maintainers can only account for so many configurations. Its not so critical with dovecot now since v2, because, regrettably, Timo removed a lot of fine tune config options that allowed us to only build in what we wanted, now, tuff, most the auth methods and stuff must be built even if we dont want them.

That hasn't been my experience, but maybe because the non-optional stuff are what I need. For example, my configure for v2.1.x summarizes

Install prefix . : /opt/dovecot
File offsets ... : 64bit
I/O polling .... : poll
I/O notifys .... : none
SSL ............ : yes (OpenSSL)
GSSAPI ......... : no
passdbs ........ : static passwd passwd-file checkpassword
		 : -shadow -pam -bsdauth -sia -ldap -sql -vpopmail
userdbs ........ : static prefetch passwd passwd-file checkpassword
		 : -ldap -sql -vpopmail -nss
SQL drivers .... :
		 : -pgsql -mysql -sqlite
Full text search : squat
		 : -lucene -solr

A few auth methods, which even if you don't use, is a nice fallback for exceptions or niche caches, no dbs, one mandatory text search method.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com>