[Dovecot] 1.0.beta6 released

[Chris Wakelin]

Les Mikesell wrote:
>> I'm just not sure why people want to do upgrade surgery on critical systems 
>> running on dovecot at any time, leave it in a 95% working state and hope users 
>> don't notice, whereby upgrading any other service would be done in a more 
>> controlled manner at a planned date/time with a full clean restart of the 
>> service.  It only takes 10-15s to shut the child processes down and restart 
>> them, and then you know that everything is running properly on the new version.
>>
>> Upgrading apache/sendmail/postfix/bind/qmail all requires a full service restart 
>> of the master and child processes, I'm not sure why there are complaints when 
>> dovecot just takes on the same behaviour.
> 
> Those services are all short term connections with no state
> maintained.  No one will notice if you restart them or even
> reconnect the next time to a different machine.  IMAP clients
> get very unhappy when they lose their connection and most don't
> fix it transparently.  Unfortunately since they don't disconnect
> on a regular basis it probably isn't a good idea to even try
> to wait for the client to finish like apache does on a graceful
> restart.  You might as well just kill it and say 'oops...'.  It
> might be worth some effort to let a pop connection finish, though.
> 

I think it depends a bit on how big the upgrade was as well. If the
dovecot index format hasn't changed, then you're probably OK letting
older imap processes carry on for a bit (minus logging). If the indexes
*have* changed then you run the risk of a second imap connection opening
the same folder (e.g. to move messages) and the two versions getting
into a rebuild war over the indexes.

I've been contemplating an on-the-fly upgrade from beta3 for the two
issues we've seen but that most users aren't noticing: outlook-idle fix
is broken and something goes wrong with our webmail when postponing a
message (probably an "append" issue).

Best Wishes,
Chris

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Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading,  Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK              Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094