Re: imapsync and Debian. Yes we can!

[Gilles LAMIRAL]

Hi Daniel and everybody,

It's a reply for the Daniel's message
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/10/msg00481.html

I encounter the topic sometimes, how about imapsync back into Debian?

As the author of imapsync, my quick answer is yes, I would be pleased
to see imapsync brought back into Debian!

Now, for the guys who have time to read, I detail my answer below.

> But it  seems that  imapsync is  no longer  available in  the Debian
> repositories [2]  because the  developer was implementing  a payment
> model for  obtaining this  software and then  maybe he  thought that
> Debian could affect their income so he gave a resounding "No" [3] to
> continue distributing it. A very respectable decision, I think.

My final words on this discussion five years ago, in January 2011,
were:

"Do what you want, I promise I won't complain anymore about the
fact imapsync is on Debian or not."
It's here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2011/01/msg00058.html

Those words are still available today and now I am also able to
transform the previous No in Yes. Even more: Yes, I would be proud to
see imapsync in Debian again!

So why I've changed my mind about imapsync in Debian? Well, the true
reason for my initial "No" was that imapsync in the current Debian of
those times was at least 2 years older than the current public
imapsync (that part is ok) and I was somehow fed up to receive Debian
users bugs reports directly about bugs already fixed upstream for a
long time.

The new business model was secondary since it was a try.  The free and
gratis github copy of imapsync started on the 12 March 2011, just one
month after imapsync was chosen to disappear from Debian Sid. Imapsync
disappearance in Debian was decided by its Debian packager, not by me,
not because of my "no" once clarified by the "do what you want", but
because the packager wanted to package only free and gratis software
from upstream, a respectable condition for someone also working for
free. He also asked me if I wanted to package imapsync in Debian
myself and I didn't take the charge.

Free, gratis, up to date imapsync download sites have always been
there, legally, fully permitted by the author in the license file or
directly. Imapsync has been packaged for a long time in Centos,
Fedora, Gentoo, ArchLinux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. This has never weakened
my imapsync business, never.  I've now come to the following conclusion
about free software sales (and even non-free): If the price is fair
enough for them, people who want to buy buy, people who don't want to
buy don't buy, no matter the license. Think about when you do buy
software and when you don't, and why. Do it truly, don't fool
yourself.

> I was checking the official site [4] of imapsync and even though the
> developer seems  to have a  paid business  model, it seems  that the
> source code is still available. In fact he has documented the Debian
> installation process [5] and there he makes mention of downloading a
> tarball.  Although  I  do  not  see  a link  on  where  to  get  the
> tarball. Maybe I'm missing something?

The imapsync Debian installation document
[5] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/INSTALL.d/INSTALL.Debian.txt
says:

The license is now "No limits to do anything with this work and this
license".  Full dist/ is back to https://imapsync.lamiral.info/dist/

So feel free.

Feel free and get free imapsync at https://imapsync.lamiral.info/dist/
or at https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

Debian folks will prefer github because of the systematic patch the
github maintainer applies, fixing the CVE
https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-4279
See
http://lamiral.info/~gilles/imapsync/#NUMBERS
for details about that issue.

> It seems that the license [6] has no restrictions
> For the current license, this could make it a candidate for
> incorporation in the Debian repositories again?

Yes!

Now some of my worries. Quoting
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/10/msg00482.html
"I am not going to even bother trying to understand if we can actually
distribute imapsync in Debian main given its very unusual license".

and
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/10/msg00483.html
"Yes, I agree that it is a somewhat strange license."

I thought that the complete license text, all contained in the simple
sentence "No limits to do anything with this work and this license",
was self-explanatory as one of the most free work license I ever
encountered in the universe.

I failed.

I see that I should write a FAQ about that sentence, explaining what
"no limits" means as well as "anything", maybe also "work" and
"license", a king of classic dictionary indeed. I took my time to
write that license, choosing words that could be understood by any
basic English speaker but I clearly missed this aim.

Now,

Re: imapsync and Debian

[Mart van de Wege]

Florian Pelgrim  writes:
>
> I wanted to start now a rant against Cyrus but holy shit... They have
> got a new website and it all looks modern... Maybe I should take a look
> on it again.
>
I don't care if it *looks* modern, as long as it has more information
than the old site(s); I quite like Cyrus, but until recently the
documentation was spread over multiple sites and the mailing list.

I am in fact still wrestling with getting the CalDAV component up and
running; apparently it didn't support GSSAPI authentication as of 2.4,
time for me to see if 2.5 now in Sid is better.

Mart

-- 
"We will need a longer wall when the revolution comes."
--- AJS, quoting an uncertain source.

Re: imapsync and Debian

[Florian Pelgrim]

Hi,

> It is a server with Squeeze and
> they do not even bother to use the LTS repositories, so more than two
> years ago that server is without security updates.
Problems I defently see to much in the web... :(

> So that is a not minor matter that we have to consider to be sure that
> this site will work with the PHP version of Jessie. I think both options
> (upgrade to Jessie from the current state, such as migrating to a new
> host with Jessie) take a lot of work, but I think the second alternative
> will be less painful and allow me to have a better control over
> migration as well as divide it into several phases. Anyway, all comments
> are welcome 
I did the upgrade from squeeze to jessie and things are made to fail.
And to fix this it will take hours.

Installing a fresh jessie and migrating first mail sounds much better.
The web application can be safely tested in a virtual environment like
vagrant and then you can decide what to do next.

I wanted to start now a rant against Cyrus but holy shit... They have
got a new website and it all looks modern... Maybe I should take a look
on it again.

Cheers
Flo



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Re: imapsync and Debian

[Jochen Spieker]

Daniel Bareiro:
> On 14/10/16 16:30, Jochen Spieker wrote:
> 
>>> I am planning to migrate about 200 e-mail accounts from a mail server
>>> using Dovecot to a mail server running Cyrus.
> 
>> Sounds weird! I though most people migrate _to_ Dovecot nowadays (if
>> they haven't already). Care to elaborate the reasons? I don't want to
>> discuss it, I am just curious.
> 
> […]
> 
> So that is a not minor matter that we have to consider to be sure that
> this site will work with the PHP version of Jessie. I think both options
> (upgrade to Jessie from the current state, such as migrating to a new
> host with Jessie) take a lot of work, but I think the second alternative
> will be less painful and allow me to have a better control over
> migration as well as divide it into several phases. Anyway, all comments
> are welcome :-)

Sounds reasonable, if the machine running Cyrus already exists and you
are as familiar with Cyrus as with Dovecot. Running mail and web on
different machines is probably generally a good idea anyway.

J.
-- 
I like my Toyota RAV4 because of the commanding view of the traffic
jams.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
 


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Re: imapsync and Debian

[Daniel Bareiro]

Hi, Jochen.

On 14/10/16 16:30, Jochen Spieker wrote:

>> I am planning to migrate about 200 e-mail accounts from a mail server
>> using Dovecot to a mail server running Cyrus.

> Sounds weird! I though most people migrate _to_ Dovecot nowadays (if
> they haven't already). Care to elaborate the reasons? I don't want to
> discuss it, I am just curious.

No problem. On the contrary. I appreciate your interest :-) It is not
about migrate to a different IMAP server but a problem of the
environment itself. It turns out that people who supposedly were dealing
with that server, abandoned it too much. It is a server with Squeeze and
they do not even bother to use the LTS repositories, so more than two
years ago that server is without security updates.

So I thought it would be less painful to do a clean installation of
Jessie and migrate everything to this new server (using Cyrus IMAP). But
beyond that, most worrying is on that server without updating for so
long is the institutional website exposed to anything.

So that is a not minor matter that we have to consider to be sure that
this site will work with the PHP version of Jessie. I think both options
(upgrade to Jessie from the current state, such as migrating to a new
host with Jessie) take a lot of work, but I think the second alternative
will be less painful and allow me to have a better control over
migration as well as divide it into several phases. Anyway, all comments
are welcome :-)

>> The idea is to migrate emails maintaining the status read, unread, etc,
>> and also synchronize Draft, Sent and Trash folders in each mailbox.
>>
>> I think the best will be make it through IMAP. This would also be
>> agnostic to the storage mechanism used (MAILDIR, system users accounts,
>> etc) in the source and destination servers. Following this course of
>> action, I found this [1] interesting article written by Falko Timme in
>> HowtoForge.

> Offlineimap can also do IMAP to IMAP synchronization. The author of
> imapsync mentions it on [4] as well.

Thank you. I'll take a look.


Kind regards,
Daniel



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Re: imapsync and Debian

[Jochen Spieker]

Daniel Bareiro:
> 
> I am planning to migrate about 200 e-mail accounts from a mail server
> using Dovecot to a mail server running Cyrus.

Sounds weird! I though most people migrate _to_ Dovecot nowadays (if
they haven't already). Care to elaborate the reasons? I don't want to
discuss it, I am just curious.

> The idea is to migrate emails maintaining the status read, unread, etc,
> and also synchronize Draft, Sent and Trash folders in each mailbox.
> 
> I think the best will be make it through IMAP. This would also be
> agnostic to the storage mechanism used (MAILDIR, system users accounts,
> etc) in the source and destination servers. Following this course of
> action, I found this [1] interesting article written by Falko Timme in
> HowtoForge.

Offlineimap can also do IMAP to IMAP synchronization. The author of
imapsync mentions it on [4] as well.

> [4] https://imapsync.lamiral.info

J.

-- 
My medicine shelf is my altar.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
 


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Re: imapsync and Debian

[Daniel Bareiro]

Hi, Henrique.

On 14/10/16 11:38, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Oct 2016, Daniel Bareiro wrote:
>> For the current license, this could make it a candidate for
>> incorporation in the Debian repositories again?

> We don't usually distribute software against upstream wishes.  I suppose
> there are exceptions, but IMHO there aren't any exceendingly good
> reasons to have imapsync as one of them.
> 
> I am not going to even bother trying to understand if we can actually
> distribute imapsync in Debian main given its very unusual license:
> http://imapsync.lamiral.info/LICENSE
> 
> Besides, it looks like the software is priced extremely fairly.  You pay
> to help its continuing development *once* per lifetime.  If EUR 50 is
> too much, read carefully the section about the price in bitcoins...

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I agree that it is a somewhat strange license. I also understand
that the reasons of the developer are very respectable and perhaps for
that he makes no direct advertising on how to obtain the source code
even though this is possible. It was just a curious question that I made
without intention to limit their income.


Kind regards,
Daniel



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Re: imapsync and Debian

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2016, Daniel Bareiro wrote:
> For the current license, this could make it a candidate for
> incorporation in the Debian repositories again?

We don't usually distribute software against upstream wishes.  I suppose
there are exceptions, but IMHO there aren't any exceendingly good
reasons to have imapsync as one of them.

I am not going to even bother trying to understand if we can actually
distribute imapsync in Debian main given its very unusual license:
http://imapsync.lamiral.info/LICENSE

Besides, it looks like the software is priced extremely fairly.  You pay
to help its continuing development *once* per lifetime.  If EUR 50 is
too much, read carefully the section about the price in bitcoins...

-- 
  Henrique Holschuh

imapsync and Debian

[Daniel Bareiro]

Hi all!

I am planning to migrate about 200 e-mail accounts from a mail server
using Dovecot to a mail server running Cyrus.

The idea is to migrate emails maintaining the status read, unread, etc,
and also synchronize Draft, Sent and Trash folders in each mailbox.

I think the best will be make it through IMAP. This would also be
agnostic to the storage mechanism used (MAILDIR, system users accounts,
etc) in the source and destination servers. Following this course of
action, I found this [1] interesting article written by Falko Timme in
HowtoForge.

But it seems that imapsync is no longer available in the Debian
repositories [2] because the developer was implementing a payment model
for obtaining this software and then maybe he thought that Debian could
affect their income so he gave a resounding "No" [3] to continue
distributing it. A very respectable decision, I think.

I was checking the official site [4] of imapsync and even though the
developer seems to have a paid business model, it seems that the source
code is still available. In fact he has documented the Debian
installation process [5] and there he makes mention of downloading a
tarball. Although I do not see a link on where to get the tarball. Maybe
I'm missing something?

It seems that the license [6] has no restrictions, but it is unclear
where to get the code (again, if I'm missing something, please let me
know). Apparently there is a repository on Github for imapsync [7] but I
have come to it using a search engine.

For the current license, this could make it a candidate for
incorporation in the Debian repositories again?



Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,
Daniel

[1]
https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-migrate-mailboxes-between-imap-servers-with-imapsync
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=609845
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=609845#60
[4] https://imapsync.lamiral.info
[5] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/INSTALL.d/INSTALL.Debian.txt
[6] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/NOLIMIT
[7] https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync



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