Updating Dovecot for Debian
A tweet of a friend pointed me at the removal of dovecot from Debian/testing, which surprised me a bit. Investigating the situation it seems that Dovecot in Debian is lagging a bit behind in releases, and hasn’t seen responses to some RC bugs. This sounds critical to me as dovecot is a core part of many mail setups, so I prepared updated packages.
Based on the latest released version of Dovecot, 2.3.10, I have made a package starting from the current Debian packaging and adjusted to the newer upstream. The package builds on Debian Buster (10), Testing, and Unstable on i386 and x64 archs. The packages are available on OBS, as usual:
For Unstable:
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing:
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_Testing/ ./
For Debian 10 Buster:
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_10/ ./
To make these repositories work, don’t forget that you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc.
These packages are provided without any warranty. Enjoy.
Thanks. Please also upload to debian.
I’m not the maintainer of Dovecot in Debian, the update is rather trivial (just one simple fix for patches to the documentation), and updating to stable is anyway not possible for version updates. So I don’t really see what can be done. An NMU will not be allowed for version updates. The maintainer has to step forward. The source package of the current version is available at OBS, but it is just a matter up pulling in the new release.
There are accepted ways of dealing with unresponsive maintainers without resorting to NMUs. There are also established channels for passing along fixes to the maintainers, but I don’t see any indication that you’ve tried those yet. Could you send your patches to them via a merge request on salsa (https://salsa.debian.org/debian/dovecot) or by attaching them to the bug report that triggered Dovecot’s removal from testing? (https://bugs.debian.org/951722)
Hi Noah,
first of all, the changes are trivial – import new upstream, and a trivial fix. There is no way I can send a PR that updates upstream. Then, the RC bug is about build failures (due to tests failing) on some minor architectures. I haven’t tested (and cannot easily) whether the new upstream builds better. So what are your suggestions?
Thank you for the explanation. I am relying also on that package. Great that you point via your blog to the problem arising, if the maintainer does not react.
Thanks for repository.
Hi Norbert,
thanks for providing the dovecot packages! I could continue testing the internal mail setup on Debian Edu Bullseye. Installed packages: dovecot-imapd, dovecot-gssapi (amd64); works perfectly.
Thanks Wolfgang for the feedback!
Why not use https://repo.dovecot.org instead?
Good point, I don’t know 😉 I have not checked the packages there for their quality wrt Debian packaging. If you check the sources of the packages in Debian or mine, there are with some changes. Not sure how much of that is necessary and/or included in upstreams packaging.
But thanks for the link, I will check the packages.
We have used the debian packaging as basis for our packages.
Thanks, that is nice to hear. As said, I will look into the packages tomorrow, already evening here in Japan.
Would be nice if we could establish a good cooperation.