[Dovecot] dovecot 1.2 and logging start failures

[Michal Hlavinka]

Hi,

I've got report about issue when dovecot fails to start and there is no error 
logged (error goes only to stderr)

situation:
1) dovecot is running
2) dovecot is automatically updated to new version (by yum update daemon), 
after update, dovecot is restarted (it's part of update script)
3) new dovecot fails to start (for whatever reason)

result:
dovecot not running and no error message has been logged because (at least 
some) errors were written to stderr only and not syslog

another situation (original issue) was when dovecot was configured to listen 
for ipv4 and ipv6 connections. ipv6 support was disabled. After server reboot, 
dovecot failed to start, producing 

dovecot: Fatal: listen(::, 143) failed: Address already in use

only to stderr, nothing in logs.

Would it be possible to use syslog for error output sooner or there are any 
cons?

Regards,
Michal Hlavinka