Bug#454498: 2.3.13 now available.

Sven Mueller sven at debian.org
Mon Dec 22 14:57:41 UTC 2008


Duncan Gibb schrieb:
> Ondřej Surý wrote:
> 
> OS> How about joining pkg-cyrus-imapd team on alioth?
> 
> Done.  Many thanks to whoever clicked "accept" on that.

Just for the record, that would have been me.
After some fuckups I made, he Duncan is now also able to use the SVN
repo (and even change his password for access there ;-))

> OS> And please bear in mind that we try to be pretty conservative,
> OS> especially when it comes to bdb version.
> 
> The hack we use at the moment picks whichever libdb*-dev package is
> installed on the build host (there can be only one as they all mutually
> conflict).  We're currently using 4.4 on Etch and 4.6 on Lenny.  That's
> convenient for doing new deployments but could do with some neatening
> for upgrades.

True. There need to be some upgrade scripts since BDB is historically
bad at backwards compatibility and cyrus uses some BDB databases by
default, which need to be upgraded if moving from 4.2 to 4.4 or 4.6.
Also Henrique (hmh) seems to distrust newer BDB versions by default.

> OS> That also means that before 2.3 hits unstable there has to be a
> OS> clean way
> 
> preferably automated

True. In my opinion, there are only two options:
1) Do as before: Release a new package cyrus-2.3-imapd which conflicts
with cyrus-2.2-imapd, but doesn't provide any automatic upgrade
2) Use transition package to upgrade automatically from 2.2 to 2.3 and
also automatically update the BDB files (with backups so a rollback is
possible if the upgrade fails for some reason).

Note that I know at least two companies (besides my own) that have
cyrus-imapd in a simple failover scenario where the data files of cyrus
live on a shared DRBD device and are only available on one of the two
servers at any given time (which means that the upgrade scripts should
warn about missing data files, but not die IMHO, ideally they should die
though if there are only _some_ of the data files missing, but not all,
which would mean some inconsistency if they were upgraded while the
others are not also upgraded)

> OS> how to upgrade from 2.2 (including all those nasty bdb databases, etc.).
> 
> and if possible downgrade again...

Would be nice, but isn't as important IMHO. Sys admins should make
sufficient backups before upgrading such critical packages as an IMAP
server, which would mean that the downgrade path could be: Remove
Cyrus-imapd 2.3, in 2.2, restore data files from backup. Note that this
would in any case not necessarily mean that mails would be lost, since
there is always cyrreconstruct.

regards,
Sven



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