dovecot as alternative

[Klos, Paul]

Mihai Badici schreef op 2013-05-30 21:52:
> I tried to replace cyrus-imapd with dovecot-ldap on debian on a
> running kolab3 installation.
> My plan was first to install dovecot from distribution and compile
> the metadata support after.
> As i know there are plans to include metadata support in the main
> software, so I hope in the near future the distribution package could
> be used as is.
> But I didn't find a way to replace the package.
> I'm not a regular Debian user and I'm not exactly an expert in
> packaging Debian, but as I see, dovecot-imapd is marked as exclusive
> via kolab, so if I try to apt-get dovecot-imapd whole kolab will be
> uninstaled.
> In fact if I stop cyrus-imapd dovecot could work without any
> problems, I even don't need to uninstal it.
> So, I wonder if there is a way to allow dovecot-imapd to be installed
> as an alternative imap server.

It would be quite easy to allow dovecot as an alternative imap server. 
I'm pretty sure setup-kolab doesn't work with dovecot, and to the best 
of my knowledge setup-kolab does not check whether or not cyrus is 
installed, it just assumes that it is. Which is correct with the current 
installation dependencies.

So it gets a little bit more complex. I'm thinking we could have kolab 
depend on an imap server (either cyrus, which would be the default, or 
dovecot, or anything else). In combination, we could move the dependency 
on cyrus to the kolab-conf package, so cyrus would be required for 
setup-kolab - at least for now. The end result being that you can 
install any old imap server, but if it isn't cyrus, you'd be on your own 
in terms of setting up your server.

If you could file a bug, we could work against that to see what can be 
done.

> Well, I could compile from source, but I already done that for
> Slackware, on Debian it is supposed to be easy :)
> 

It is, provided the package maintainer makes it easy :-D.

Cheers,

Paul