dovecot update warning

[Bill Davidsen]

Todd Zullinger wrote:
> Tom Horsley wrote:
>> On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:19:46 -0400 Bill McGonigle wrote:
>>
>>> would a sed script to fix this be appropriate in the RPM?  Sorry, I
>>> forget if scripts can know if they're running in upgrade mode.
> 
> Yeah, rpm does provide a mechanism for scriptlets to know if they are
> installing, upgrading or removing.  But...
> 
>> If past experience is any indication, it is easier to find and fix
>> these things manually than to try and automate them with "helpful"
>> scripts that can't possibly be tested on every config file everyone
>> has manually modified in weird and wonderful ways :-).
> 
> what Tom says here is quite true. :)
> 
>> Perhaps a script that printed a big warning saying Hey! Your config
>> file mentions the "cumsieve" plugin that is no longer provided!, but
>> didn't try to actually fix it itself would be helpful.
> 
> That won't happen in proper Fedora packages as printing text via a
> package scriptlet it is strongly frowned upon.
> 
> It seems to me that if the dovecot update can cause loss of mail
> through incompatible changes, it should not be pushed to a stable
> release in the first place.  If that's the case and you lost mail
> because of this, it's surely worth filing a bug so the maintainer
> knows about the problem.
> 
That was my thought as well, the issue isn't totally simple, but this appears to 
be something that fold follow the path:
   working_mail -> apply Fedora RPM -> lost mail
It's desirable to make that "the path less traveled" because lost mail is always 
something a user or admin remembers as something they REALLY don't like about a 
distribution.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot