[Dovecot] State of the FTS modules and packaging

[Benjamin Podszun]

Hi there.

I'm running a small (VPS) mail system just for myself for quite a while and 
want to support some friends and family now. For that I'm improving / 
documenting the setup.

One thing I never cared to implement was FTS support. Looking at the 
options [1] now, I'm stuck. I don't want solr (no Java bashing here, I'm 
sure that's working awesome. But I don't want to pull all these 
dependencies in on my tiny VPS: Memory and disk will be as small as I can 
get away with).

With that out of the way: What are my options?

Squat: Why's squat deprecated? Did it stop working? Can someone shed some 
light on the original reasons for the deprecation? What are the risks to go 
with squat anyway?

Clucene: That seems .. unusable. It would be my prefered choice (not 
deprecated, little dependencies), but .. it isn't packaged in deb based 
distributions (Debian, Ubuntu). It doesn't even _build_, because it doesn't 
use pkg-config to find the clucene includes (at least for 2.1.17) in these 
environments.

Centos is even more out of date with 2.0.9.

Given the experience above, is solr my only option to offer FTS? Can you 
guys share how you're having a stable base/os with a somewhat recent (and 
complete!) dovecot package?

Thanks a lot & regards,
Ben

1: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS