[arch-general] Dovecot: bug or user error?
Hi archers, I've just made one of my machines an arch box, and one thing that gave me headaches no end was setting up dovecot on it. In my setup I'm using PAM authentication with a passwd userdb. So no reliance on mysql or postgreql. When installing dovecot, pacman informs me that I may want to install some mysql or postgresql libraries as *optional* dependencies if I want to use those backends. Since I don't, I didn't install these libraries at first. After some long debugging sessions, I realized that my failure to connect to my freshly setup dovecot server was because dovecot-auth failed. It was looking for the mysql and postgreql shared libraries that were not installed. After installing these libraries, all was fine. So now I'm wondering whether there may be something wrong with my setup that forces dovecot to at least try the mysql/postgresql backends, which it would need those libraries for. The other option is that I did everything right, and dovecot-auth is simply linked against those libraries and cannot run without them, no matter what the configuration file says. In the former case, I'd appreciate some enlightenment as to what I should be looking for in my configuration to remove dovecot's dependency on these libraries. In the latter case, I'd say a bug report is in order because if dovecot-auth relies on these libraries, they should be pulled in as dependencies instead of being declared optional. Cheers, Norbert -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments
On Thu, 2010-10-07 at 13:16 -0300, Norbert Zeh wrote:
After some long debugging sessions, I realized that my failure to connect to my freshly setup dovecot server was because dovecot-auth failed. It was looking for the mysql and postgreql shared libraries that were not installed.
If dovecot-auth links to the mysql and/or postgresql libraries, those libraries should not be in optdepends, but in depends. The problem with adding link-level dependencies for optional components to optdepends is that namcap doesn't know why you added the optdepend, and doesn't report any warning about link-level dependencies for optdepends. We've seen these bugs in several applications, so maintainers should really pay attention to this.
Jan de Groot [2010.10.07 1926 +0200]:
On Thu, 2010-10-07 at 13:16 -0300, Norbert Zeh wrote:
After some long debugging sessions, I realized that my failure to connect to my freshly setup dovecot server was because dovecot-auth failed. It was looking for the mysql and postgreql shared libraries that were not installed.
If dovecot-auth links to the mysql and/or postgresql libraries, those libraries should not be in optdepends, but in depends. The problem with adding link-level dependencies for optional components to optdepends is that namcap doesn't know why you added the optdepend, and doesn't report any warning about link-level dependencies for optdepends. We've seen these bugs in several applications, so maintainers should really pay attention to this.
Thanks for the reply Jan. ldd does say dovecot-auth is linked against these two libraries. I'll file a bug report then. Cheers, Norbert -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments
participants (2)
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Jan de Groot
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Norbert Zeh