Migrating to Dovecot EE

Sven Hartge

2014-10-10 09:09:56 UTC

I am currently running dovecot 2.2.9 on my Debian Wheezy system. As
this version is a bit outdated and I'm not too keen on compiling
Dovecot myself I was thinking about moving to the Dovecot EE
repository. I already have access to the repository, and now before I
starting "apt-getting" all kinds of packages: What would be the best
way on moving to the Dovecot EE repository? Just doing an apt-get
install dovecot-ee? Will it replace the current version? Or should the
old version be removed before installing the new one? Has anyone ever
done this and has some advice for me?

I've done it like this:

1) backup /etc/dovecot
2) purge old dovecot packages
This removes all dovecot internal users, but do not worry, they
will be recreated by the dovecot-ee packages.
This also deletes all config files, but you have a backup from step 1.
3) install dovecot-ee packages
4) put config files from backup back to /etc/dovecot

Beware: the pacakge system allows you to replace the old dovecot
packages with the dovecot-ee packages, but due to the way the Debian
package system works, this will wreck your dovecot-configuration once
you finally purge the old packages, because then this also purges the
old config files and deletes the dovecot-internal users (like dovenull).

This is why it is very important to _first_ delete _and_ purge the old
packages before installation of the dovecot-ee packages.

Gr??e,
Sven.

--
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.