dovecot - Nov 2005 - a proposal to increase the stability

Hi,

we've been using dovecot for the past 2 years or so for our 3K+ mail
accounts and have never regretted our step.

Yet from time to time there appear to be, how shall I say, "major"
problems in the daemon that of course are no reason to whine and
complain about because dovecot is OSS and everybody can do something
about it.

And that's where I would like to make a suggestion. From our own
software projects I am used to the usage of extensive testing
frameworks, like junit for java based applications.

I almost completely lack knowledge about C/C++ programming, so I have no
idea if something like this could be done for dovecot. For "the other
end" of the mail chain I know dumbster, which is a fake SMTP server used
for testing MUAs. So maybe something similar could be done for IMAP/POP3
servers?

What I am thinking of is to run those tests before anything new is
released. On the other hand I cannot even estimate how much work would
be needed for this ...

Udo Rader

-- 
bestsolution.at EDV Systemhaus GmbH
http://www.bestsolution.at
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> What I am thinking of is to run those tests before anything new is
> released. On the other hand I cannot even estimate how much work would
> be needed for this ...
> 
> Udo Rader
> 
You could develop a test suite using something like perl.
The approach would be run beat the hell out of all the functionality 
that dovecot provides and validate the input/output against what is 
expected.  It's a black-box style of testing, but it would help indicate 
any potential problems.   It was through my own version of this that I 
found there are some limitations to how many UIDS I can transmit at one 
time.  But who expects >10,000 UIDS in a single call?

Between running IMAP calls to localhost and inspecting the local 
filesystem directly, I suspect a really nice test suite could be 
developed.  Interestingly, most of it could apply to more than just 
dovecot if you seperate testing for IMAP/Maildir standard formats from 
dovecot particulars (like indexing?).