Ok, here's a toughie:
Out of a whim (and because of the bad weather) I today decided to upgrade my
completely functioning 2.0.15 installation on my Mac OS X 10.6.7 system. NB:
It's not a Mac OS X "Server", as sold by Apple - I have compiled my dovecots
myself for quite a while.
Anyhow: At first everything appeared to work fine after the upgrade. Up until I
created a new user and -while testing- SELECTed his INBOX.
The SELECT was "stuck". Though the process seemed to be alive I could only get
rid of it with a "kill -9 <pid>".
The same happened when selecting a newly created mailbox on any of the other
(otherwise functioning) accounts, so the problem had nothing to do with the new
account, but rather with the fact, that it's INBOX was empty.
Using dtruss and gdb I found out, that the dovecot process was trying to obtain
a GUID and in the course of doing so invoked gethostbyname(), which intern
caused a lot of "mach message" handling and somewhere, deep down there, the
process was stuck.
Well, that led my to believe, that there was something wrong with the -so
called- "mach bootstrap context". I usually start dovecot from with a
(home-brewn) startup-script, which invokes it (practically) like so:
sudo /usr/libexec/StartupItemContext dovecot
(again: all this was working fine under 2.0.15)
Now with 2.1.10, when I manually invoke dovecot with just
sudo dovecot
Everything appears to work fine - at least the sessions don't get stuck any
more. But as soon as I logout (with dovecot still running in the background) it
loses it's "mach bootstrap context" and finds itself unable to perform even the
simplest tasks, like mapping a username to a uid, etc. pp. -- so starting it
without the "/usr/libexec/StartupItemContext" in the background is out of the
question.
Now -with all that said- here's my question:
What has changed with regards to "processual context" between 2.0.15 and 2.1.10
when the "imap" process is spawned/exec'd? Any environmental cleanups, closing
of unknown fds, deletion/modification of environment variables,
process-group-handlers, etc.?
It appears, that the imap process no longer "inherits" the StartupItemContext
from the main process, so some change between 2.0.15 and 2.1.10 must have
broken it ...
Any help is highly appreciated -
Clemens
PS: I google'd around a lot and searched the mailing-lists, of course. I only
found a post of someone who ran into the same/similar problem dating back to
Feb 21st 2012 under the subject "dovecot freezes when trying to get mail from
maildir with mail", but it was quickly dismissed without ever getting resolved
and that was that.
PS2: I intentionally didn't include any configs with this mail as they seem to
be irrelevant, but of course I can generate the necessary output if needed.
