On Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:11:35 +0200, Martin wrote in message
<5000292.GXAFRqVoOG@???>:

> Hi Steve.
>
> Steve Litt - 12.07.25, 09:02:04 CEST:
> > Pin your current Dovecot 2.3.x now, and don't allow an upgrade to
> > 2.4.x. Dovecot's documentation is disorganized, unhelpful,
> > contradictory, and often just plain wrong. Right now the Dovecot
> > project is going through problems caused by their crippling free
> > software Dovecot in order to sell a commercial Dovecot with earlier
> > Dovecot's features. They call 2.4.x Dovecot Community Edition. I'm
> > calling it Dovecot Breaking Edition.
>
> Haha. I had this with my mail server container upgrade with Alpine
> 3.22.
>
> And indeed, they broke basically almost everything. The one time I
> did not tell Incus on the Devuan host system to snapshot the
> container before doing the upgrade! That thought me a lesson: Always
> snapshot on major upgrades! At least for more complex or critical
> containers.
>
> So I basically had to either restore the container from backup or fix
> up the configuration. I did the latter, but if I had known the amount
> of work beforehand, I might have skipped it at that time.
>
> I went through it and fixed my configuration for 2.4. In case you
> have any specific questions to specific configuration blocks I can
> tell you what I did to make it work. But although I do have a git
> history of my changes I do not have the time to document it all at
> the moment. So please ask what you need *after* you fixed all you can
> when reading into their configuration migration page yourself.
>
> I needed to lookup the relevant information in various places. The
> configuration file syntax changes are very broad and fundamental and
> unfortunately not all documented *with* examples of old versus new on
> *one* page. So I dug quite a bit through their reference
> documentation.
>
> At least they introduced a configuration file format version now, so
> that such a surprise should not happen again *unless* they decide to
> drop support for an older configuration file format version at some
> time.
>
> Compared to Postfix Dovecot also before sometimes has been an
> annoyance regarding configuration updates. Postfix upgrades went a
> huge lot more smoothly so far. Other than that Dovecot was okay for
> me so far.
>
> My current impression for the 2.4 changes is: They went over the
> board. By far. The new syntax is a lot more complex. Maybe one thing
> that makes sense is that you to not need input redirection sign for
> mentioned filenames in the configuration at various places anymore.
> But also may not use it anymore.
>
> Best,

..maybe the time to ditch or fork Dovecot?:
https://hub.docker.com/r/dovecot/dovecot
https://repo.dovecot.org/#sources
https://repo.dovecot.org/#debian suggests 2.3.8 (in Jessie) to
2.3.21.1 (Buster) as viable starting points for a 309th fork...
https://dovecot.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/dovecot-news@dovecot.org/thread/2CSVL56LFPAXVLWMGXEIWZL736PSYHP5/
https://dovecot.org/releases/2.3/
https://github.com/dovecot/core
https://github.com/dovecot/core/forks
https://github.com/dovecot/core/tree/release-2.3.8
https://github.com/dovecot/core/tree/release-2.3.21
https://github.com/dovecot/core/releases/tag/2.3.21.1

..beware "Compiling Dovecot From Sources" Build Instructions...
https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/release-2.3.8/INSTALL.md
https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/release-2.3.21/INSTALL.md

...etc documentation may have been messed up to prepare Open-Xchange
Oy's preferred upgrade path beyond the "INSTALL: Update documentation
links for 2.4" in https://github.com/dovecot/core/blob/main/INSTALL.md

..as https://doc.dovecot.org/main/ makes clear, "Dovecot Community
Edition​ Dovecot Community Edition (CE)" and "Dovecot CE is designed
for use on a single server. There is no support or maintenance for
multiple Dovecot servers to interact with each other."

..useful links?:
https://doc.dovecot.org/2.3/
https://github.com/orgs/dovecot/repositories?type=all


..don't wait for me here, I'm _staying_ on my good old
fetchmail->procmail->MUA path while I figure out how, why
and whether pipewire+wireplumber dying in the middle of
a youtube video has anything to do with Devuan people
talking here of going Xlibre rather than Wayland...

--
..med vennlig hilsen = with Kind Regards from Arnt Karlsen
...with a number of polar bear hunters in his ancestry...
Scenarios always come in sets of three:
best case, worst case, and just in case.