Hi Dennis,
On 6/12/2011 3:55 PM, Dennis Schridde wrote:
Hello everyone!
I just released dovecot-metadata-8, which is an implementation of RFC 5464
(IMAP METADATA), allowing to add comments/annotations/metadata to folders of
an email account.
Nice!
I've browsed the source a little and I compiled it, but I haven't
actually tested it yet. However, I have a few comments/requests already.
The build process is pretty much straightforward, just make sure you have the
dovecot headers available on your system:
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-dovecot=/path/to/dovecot
make
make install
I had some compile problems. First of all, my Debian stable has automake
1.10 and thus does not support the new silent-rules feature. I'd suggest
the following patch to maintain backwards compatibility for the time being:
diff -r 8077ad9bce6f configure.ac
--- a/configure.ac Sun Jun 12 13:54:06 2011 +0200
+++ b/configure.ac Mon Jun 20 10:36:29 2011 +0200
@@ -1,7 +1,9 @@
AC_PREREQ(2.65)
AC_INIT([dovecot-metadata],[8],[[email protected]])
-AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.10 silent-rules])
+AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.10])
+m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES], [AM_SILENT_RULES])
+
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
Also, I usually like to compile against an uninstalled Dovecot source
tree, e.g. to perform tests without installing anything. This failed
because the currently installed dovecot.m4 does not provide
LIBDOVECOT_IMAP_INCLUDE. Timo, could you fix this?
diff -r 327486d79620 dovecot.m4
--- a/dovecot.m4 Thu Jun 16 16:37:42 2011 +0300
+++ b/dovecot.m4 Mon Jun 20 10:33:29 2011 +0200
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
AX_SUBST_L([DOVECOT_CFLAGS], [DOVECOT_LIBS],
[DOVECOT_SSL_LIBS], [DOVECOT_SQL_LIBS])
AX_SUBST_L([LIBDOVECOT], [LIBDOVECOT_LOGIN], [LIBDOVECOT_SQL],
[LIBDOVECOT_LDA], [LIBDOVECOT_STORAGE])
AX_SUBST_L([LIBDOVECOT_DEPS], [LIBDOVECOT_LOGIN_DEPS],
[LIBDOVECOT_SQL_DEPS], [LIBDOVECOT_LDA_DEPS], [LIBDOVECOT_STORAGE_DEPS])
- AX_SUBST_L([LIBDOVECOT_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_LDA_INCLUDE],
[LIBDOVECOT_SERVICE_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_STORAGE_INCLUDE],
[LIBDOVECOT_LOGIN_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_CONFIG_INCLUDE])
+ AX_SUBST_L([LIBDOVECOT_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_LDA_INCLUDE],
[LIBDOVECOT_SERVICE_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_STORAGE_INCLUDE],
[LIBDOVECOT_LOGIN_INCLUDE], [LIBDOVECOT_CONFIG_INCLUDE],
[LIBDOVECOT_IMAP_INCLUDE])
DC_PLUGIN_DEPS
])
The fact that this package relies on an installed dovecot.m4 also makes
compiling against an uninstalled source tree a bit of a chicken-egg
problem. Pigeonhole includes a version of dovecot.m4 (albeit modified)
in the distribution for this purpose, but I am not sure that is the best
solution. Also, since compiling against an uninstalled Dovecot currently
has no real purpose for this package for now (it may have when I
implement the related Sieve features as discussed below), I would not
give fixing this any priority at all.
If you find any bugs (crashes, incompatibilities with RFC 5464, etc), please
write me a mail. Be advised that this code is still experimental and might
crash your server!
Now that Dovecot has IMAP METADATA support, it would be nice to
implement the Sieve side of the story as well. This is specified in
RFC5490 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5490). These Sieve language
extensions allow matching against server and mailbox annotations in
Sieve scripts.
To build Sieve plugins for the aforementioned features, I would need to
have access to the metadata backend to read the annotation entries. For
that reason, I would like to suggest that you put the metadata storage
backend in a separate shared library, such that other future plugins and
tools can link against it to gain access to the metadata storage.
Pigeonhole does something similar already; the Sieve interpreter is
installed as /usr/lib/dovecot/libdovecot-sieve.so and the LDA plugin
makes use of it, as do command line tools such as sieve-test.
Regards,
Stephan
