[Dovecot] locking strategies?

[Bill Cole]

At 7:04 PM -0500 11/30/07, Joe Allesi -X (joallesi - Coyote Creek 
Consulting at Cisco) wrote:
>You had to ask that...we're still on 0.99,

I'm not sure that holding to a strategy of "Embracing 0.99" is a wise 
decision to admit to in a public forum under your own name or in any 
way traceable to an employer or client, but maybe you have missed the 
subtext of the responses to your post on that choice and to others 
who have asked for 0.99 help over the past year or so. Maybe a more 
explicit warning will help...

You are running a forked distribution derived from a version of 
Dovecot which is known to have bugs that can cause mailbox 
corruption. You probably cannot configure avoidance of all of the 
destructive issues in 0.99. It seems likely that using dotlocking 
will reduce the odds of running into some 0.99 bugs, but it is not 
rational to expect that you can avoid all of the risks with using 
0.99 by configuring it in some particular manner. You cannot even 
adequately understand all of the risks given the migration of most 
other users of that software over the past few years to later 
versions. RedHat forked the distribution they support for RHEL4 over 
three years ago, before the last 3 releases of Dovecot 0.99.x and 
before any 1.x release.

Another way to look at this is that you are not actually running the 
"real" Dovecot, but rather a different thing forked by RedHat from a 
codebase that was significantly different from today's Dovecot. It 
might actually have all of the 0.99.11 bugs fixed, but if that's the 
case then they have been fixed by RedHat for their customers, and you 
might be making the right choice. In the alternate reality where 
using the latest RH-supported release of Dovecot 0.99 is not a 
laughably incompetent and irresponsible choice, you should be looking 
for support to RedHat, not to the user community or developer of the 
real Dovecot.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com