[Dovecot] Upgrade to 2.0 - Not so smooth

[William Blunn]

On 15/08/2010 22:49, Marc Perkel wrote:
> On 8/15/2010 2:32 PM, Marcus Rueckert wrote:
>> On 2010-08-15 14:01:25 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
>>> Seems to me that it wouldn't take a lot of code to at lease find if
>>> they have adduser or useradd.
>> that is 2 out of many solutions.
>> and depending of the admin he might create the user in an ldap tree or a
>> nis server.
>>
>> also packager dont really like users created from the buildsystem.
>>
>>      darix
>>
>
> Perhaps a better error message that says something like:
>
> Dovecot needs a user named "dovenull" to work. Please create user 
> "dovenull" and try again.

No.

The first sentence of your proposed message is FALSE.

On 15/08/2010 17:10, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> - Dovecot uses two internal users now by default: dovenull and 
> dovecot. You need to create the dovenull user or change 
> default_login_user setting.

Dovecot does NOT need a user named "dovenull" to work.

The second sentence is predicated on the first and as such also falls down.

Dovecot needs a user named by the default_login_user setting in order to 
work. Whilst this defaults to "dovenull", there is nothing to stop you 
setting it to something else (e.g. "flibble").

The point is that the answer is more of a commentary and the right 
solution depends on the situation.

Rather than try to squeeze solution summaries into every error message, 
I would suggest having a link (perhaps into the Dovecot wiki) in the 
error message, e.g.

Starting Dovecot Imap: Fatal: service(pop3-login) User doesn't exist: 
dovenull (see http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Errors/NoDefaultLoginUser)

(Note that the above URL is hypothetical.)

Then have a commentary and suggested solutions in the wiki.

Alternatively, the link could rooted at a notional documentation root like:

Starting Dovecot Imap: Fatal: service(pop3-login) User doesn't exist: 
dovenull (see documentation "Errors/NoDefaultLoginUser")

so that users could refer to a local copy of the documentation rather 
than encouraging load on the Dovecot wiki server(s).

Bill