Pathetic Upgrade Question: 2.0.9 to 2.3.0

[Peter]

On 09/01/18 08:23, John Tulp wrote:
> I installed a new virtual machine with CentOS 6.9

Just so you know Red Hat classifies RHEL6 (and by extension CentOS 6) as
being in Phase 3 support, which means that only the most critical
security vulnerabilities get updates now.  I would not recommend
starting a new server with CentOS 6, but rather you should be using
CentOS 7 instead.

> Then, wanting to be on the latest stable version of dovecot anyway, I
> downloaded dovecot 2.3.0 from dovecot.org and attempted to follow the
> instructions on building from source,

And this was your next problem.  You should very rarely, if ever build
and install from source onto a package-managed distribution, and only if
you really understand what you're doing and why.  There are packages
available for dovecot 2.3.0 from dovecot.org now that you can replace
the stock dovecot packages with, or you can also use the packages
available from ghettoforge.org.  Either one of those sources is vastly
preferable to installing from source.

> I actually got an email to get appended to the users mbox file.

I'm not sure how since above you said you were using Maildir delivery.

> It appears that make install has not replaced the old 2.0.9 binaries
> with new 2.3.0 binaries, even though it faithfully created everying
> under the /usr directories, e.g., /usr/bin, etc., and make install did
> not set some variable or otherwise configure for the new version to run
> instead of the old.  Well, maybe.

And if you did manage to successfully replace replace the CentOS stock
dovecot binaries you would be in for a heap of trouble.  Among other
reasons the moment you run "yum update" and it finds and updates the
dovecot packages CentOS will replace all those files that you just built
with the older dovecot 2.0 files that it distributes again.

> Precisely how should this 2.3.0, built from source, be properly
> installed and configured to actually run the new version ?

It shouldn't, see above.


Peter