Subversion Repositories

?revision_form?Rev ?revision_input??revision_submit??revision_endform?

Rev 8 | Details | Compare with Previous | Last modification | View Log | RSS feed

Rev Author Line No. Line
3 magnus 1
prayer for Debian
2
-----------------
3
 
4
The Debian version of Prayer is built with SSL support with session
37 magnus 5
cache using libdb4.6, gzip Content-Transfer-Encoding, LDAP, and System
8 magnus 6
V mutex support. The previous version, which was only uloaded to the
7
experimental distribution, was heavily patched to add UTF-8 and IPv6
8
support among other things. All that has been incorporated and
9
improved by upstream in 1.1.0. The remaining patches concern changes
37 magnus 10
to the default configuration as detailed below, or fix bugs. You can
11
always find information about patches in changelog.Debian.gz.
3 magnus 12
 
37 magnus 13
To enable Prayer, you must edit /etc/default/prayer and change
14
ENABLED=0 to ENABLED=1. But before you do that you should go through
15
/etc/prayer/prayer.cf and adapt it to your needs. In particular, if
16
you already run a web server on this machine you need to change
17
use_http_port (and use_https_port) to something else.
18
 
19
Debian-specific configuration defaults:
20
 
21
 * Static files (templates, icons, CSS files) are installed in
22
   /usr/share/prayer in accordance with policy. The prefix option
23
   points there, while var_prefix, the location of pid files
24
   (pid_dir), sockets (socket_dir), and the SSL session cache
25
   (ssl_session_dir), is /var/run/prayer and subdirectories.  Log
26
   files are written to /var/log/prayer (log_dir) and /tmp is used to
27
   temporarily store uploaded attachments (tmp_dir).
28
 
29
 * Prayer by default runs as user prayer (created on install) and
30
   group nogroup. The prayer user is added to the ssl-cert group on
31
   installation, so that it can access keys in /etc/ssl/private.
32
 
33
 * ssl_cert_file and ssl_privatekey_file point to the "snake oil"
34
   certificate and key created by the ssl-cert package, so that you
35
   only have to uncomment use_https_port to enable encryption. For a
36
   production server you should of course install a real certificate.
37
 
38
 * Support for SSL session caching is compiled in, but caching is
39
   disabled by default, as it probably doesn't make that much a
40
   difference on modern hardware. To enable it, uncomment the
41
   ssl_session_timeout setting in prayer.cf. You should also arrange
42
   for prayer-ssl-prune and prayer-db-prune to be run periodically,
43
   for example by placing symlinks to them in /etc/cron.hourly or
44
   /etc/cron.daily.
45
 
46
 * The default IMAP folders for sent mail (sent_mail_folder) and
47
   drafts (postponed_folder) are "Sent" and "Drafts", respectively,
48
   the default for Mozilla Thunderbird and others (although many IMAP
49
   clients unfortunately use localized folder names).
50
 
51
 * socket_split_dir is off by default to reduce complexity when
52
   testing. You will probably only need it if you have lots of
53
   simultaneous users and a file system without directory indexes.
54
 
55
Customizing templates:
56
 
57
To use customized templates you must set template_use_compiled to
58
FALSE in prayer.cf. Then copy the template (.t file) you wish to
59
customize from /usr/share/prayer/templates to the corresponding
60
location under /etc/prayer/templates and edit it there. Prayer will
61
still use the compiled-in versions of the remaining templates, thanks
62
to a small patch.
63
 
3 magnus 64
Quirks:
65
 
66
 * If your IMAP server supports STARTTLS, then Prayer (actually the
8 magnus 67
   libc-client IMAP client library) will use it automatically. To
68
   disable, append "/notls" to the IMAP server name(s) specified with
69
   imapd_server. To force TLS, append "/tls". Make sure that the
70
   server name you specify for imapd_server in prayer.cf matches the
71
   Common Name in the SSL certificate; otherwise libc-client will
72
   refuse to accept it. To disable that check, use "/novalidate-cert".
73
   Other switches you can append are listed in the file naming.txt.gz
74
   in the documentation directory of the C-client library.
3 magnus 75
 
8 magnus 76
 * If your IMAP server is Dovecot (or any of a number of others,
77
   probably), then you must change prefs_folder_name to something not
78
   containing a dot. Unfortunately this means that the preference
79
   folder will be fully visible.
3 magnus 80
 
37 magnus 81
 * Prayer doesn't handle signals gracefully yet, which means that it
82
   will leave SysV semaphores lying around when it is stopped or
83
   restarted.  You can use ipcs to find them and ipcrm to delete them.
3 magnus 84
 
37 magnus 85
 * While Prayer does its best to remove potentially harmful tags from
86
   HTML email, it doesn't try to convert it to XHTML. This means that
87
   Prayer's output is conformant XHTML only when not viewing HTML
88
   mail.
89
 
90
 * Prayer deletes mail the IMAP way, which is by marking messages as
91
   deleted and leaving them in their folders. Prayer always lists
92
   deleted messages (with a special icon) and expunges (deletes
93
   permanently) deleted messages only when explicitly requested.
94
   Before that they can be undeleted at any time by "unmarking" them.
95
 
96
   Most mail client software deletes mail by moving it to a "trash"
97
   folder, which in reality means creating a copy in the trash folder
98
   and marking the original deleted. Messages that are marked as
99
   deleted are usually never listed, cannot be unmarked, and are often
100
   automatically expunged. These two approaches are rather
101
   incompatible, but some software can take either.
102
 
103
 -- Magnus Holmgren <holmgren@debian.org>, Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:57:05 +0200
104