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prayer for Debian
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The Debian version of Prayer is built with SSL support with session
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cache using libdb4.6, gzip Content-Transfer-Encoding, LDAP, and System
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V mutex support. The previous version, which was only uloaded to the
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experimental distribution, was heavily patched to add UTF-8 and IPv6
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support among other things. All that has been incorporated and
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improved by upstream in 1.1.0. The remaining patches concern changes
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to the default configuration as detailed below, or fix bugs. You can
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always find information about patches in changelog.Debian.gz.
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To enable Prayer, you must edit /etc/default/prayer and change
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ENABLED=0 to ENABLED=1. But before you do that you should go through
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/etc/prayer/prayer.cf and adapt it to your needs. In particular, if
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you already run a web server on this machine you need to change
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use_http_port (and use_https_port) to something else.
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Debian-specific configuration defaults:
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 * Static files (templates, icons, CSS files) are installed in
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   /usr/share/prayer in accordance with policy. The prefix option
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   points there, while var_prefix, the location of pid files
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   (pid_dir), sockets (socket_dir), and the SSL session cache
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   (ssl_session_dir), is /var/run/prayer and subdirectories.  Log
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   files are written to /var/log/prayer (log_dir) and /tmp is used to
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   temporarily store uploaded attachments (tmp_dir).
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 * Prayer by default runs as user prayer (created on install) and
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   group nogroup. The prayer user is added to the ssl-cert group on
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   installation, so that it can access keys in /etc/ssl/private.
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 * ssl_cert_file and ssl_privatekey_file point to the "snake oil"
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   certificate and key created by the ssl-cert package, so that you
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   only have to uncomment use_https_port to enable encryption. For a
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   production server you should of course install a real certificate.
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 * Support for SSL session caching is compiled in, but caching is
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   disabled by default, as it probably doesn't make that much a
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   difference on modern hardware. To enable it, uncomment the
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   ssl_session_timeout setting in prayer.cf. You should also arrange
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   for prayer-ssl-prune to be run periodically, for example by placing
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   a symlink to it in /etc/cron.hourly or /etc/cron.daily.
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 * The default IMAP folders for sent mail (sent_mail_folder) and
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   drafts (postponed_folder) are "Sent" and "Drafts", respectively,
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   the default for Mozilla Thunderbird and others (although many IMAP
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   clients unfortunately use localized folder names).
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 * socket_split_dir is off by default to reduce complexity when
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   testing. You will probably only need it if you have lots of
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   simultaneous users and a file system without directory indexes.
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Customizing templates:
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To use customized templates you must set template_use_compiled to
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FALSE in prayer.cf. Then copy the template (.t file) you wish to
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customize from /usr/share/prayer/templates to the corresponding
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location under /etc/prayer/templates and edit it there. Prayer will
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still use the compiled-in versions of the remaining templates, thanks
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to a small patch.
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Quirks:
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 * If your IMAP server supports STARTTLS, then Prayer (actually the
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   libc-client IMAP client library) will use it automatically. To
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   disable, append "/notls" to the IMAP server name(s) specified with
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   imapd_server. To force TLS, append "/tls". Make sure that the
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   server name you specify for imapd_server in prayer.cf matches the
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   Common Name in the SSL certificate; otherwise libc-client will
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   refuse to accept it. To disable that check, use "/novalidate-cert".
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   Other switches you can append are listed in the file naming.txt.gz
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   in the documentation directory of the C-client library.
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 * If your IMAP server is Dovecot (or any of a number of others,
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   probably), then you must change prefs_folder_name to something not
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   containing a dot. Unfortunately this means that the preference
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   folder will be fully visible.
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 * Prayer doesn't handle signals gracefully yet, which means that it
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   will leave SysV semaphores lying around when it is stopped or
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   restarted.  You can use ipcs to find them and ipcrm to delete them.
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 * While Prayer does its best to remove potentially harmful tags from
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   HTML email, it doesn't try to convert it to XHTML. This means that
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   Prayer's output is conformant XHTML only when not viewing HTML
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   mail.
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 * Prayer deletes mail the IMAP way, which is by marking messages as
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   deleted and leaving them in their folders. Prayer always lists
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   deleted messages (with a special icon) and expunges (deletes
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   permanently) deleted messages only when explicitly requested.
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   Before that they can be undeleted at any time by "unmarking" them.
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   Most mail client software deletes mail by moving it to a "trash"
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   folder, which in reality means creating a copy in the trash folder
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   and marking the original deleted. Messages that are marked as
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   deleted are usually never listed, cannot be unmarked, and are often
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   automatically expunged. These two approaches are rather
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   incompatible, but some software can take either.
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 -- Magnus Holmgren <holmgren@debian.org>, Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:11:04 +0200
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