I’ve been running the dovecot mail server for many years now without encountering any significant issue. Configure once, run forever. But as with almost every other good project these days, there comes the time when the devs just decide to mess things up.
In the case of dovecot, a new minor version 2.4 followed upon 2.3, just as you would expect it to. But alas! On upgrade, Arch Linux tells me:
Dovecot 2.4 is incompatible with older configurations and requires manual intervention.Have they ever heard of semantic versioning? Dovecot, which also has a paid version now, provides a nicely designed, but incomprehensible upgrade info page, which delights us with statements like this:
See Dovecot Config File Syntax for the new configuration syntax. This is similar to v2.3, but different in some ways. Especially the configuration is no longer hierarchical – all settings are global settings and can be used anywhere (although they might not actually do anything there).
Which seems to pretty much sum up their new philosophy. Same is true for the new config syntax docs. It’s a mess of cross-references and circular definitions. So after clicking through confusing documentation for half an hour, I gave up on it. I should have fully read the Arch Linux upgrade message cited before:
Alternatively, there is a dovecot23 (and pigeonhole23) package available.So we’ll wait for some others to dig through the piles of pigeon droppings and figure things out. Right now it’s just waste of time.