wth is IMSP and is anyone out there using cyrus-imspd? October 5, 2007
Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , trackbackThis afternoon Christian and Jakub were discussing the “future” of cyrus-imspd on #gentoo-dev, i.e. is it worth fixing it or is it a candidate for another last rite? As the maintainer of other cyrus packages (i.e. cyrus-imapd and cyrus-imap-admin) i joined their discussion.
The cyrus website states, cyrus-imspd-1.7b is considered to be the “final version” while a newer 1.8 exists on their FTP, A handful of bugs w/ cyrus-imspd in Gentoo’s Portage were submitted to bugs.gentoo.org a while ago. Though this one is considered feature complete (other people would call it: dead) upstream the currently open bugs for cyrus-imspd in Gentoo’s Bugzilla were easy to fix (that’s what Christian said) so the conclusion was to a) fix it, b) remove the x86 stable keyword and c) keep it for now until another breakage occurs.
On a sidenote we wondered about what cyrus-imspd is actually doing or at was least designed for. Their website states
“The IMSP server is used for storing application preferences and address book data in a shared location. Few applications support IMSP preferences and address books.”
So, is anyone out there actually using cyrus-imspd (on Gentoo?) … if so please leave a comment and enlighten us! :)
Comments»
Well, it’s not listed in our documentation anywhere, unlike cyrus-sasl. So from the GDP’s point of view, it’s okay to punt. :)
I’ve been using Cyrus-IMSP on my production server in the past as a backend for the Horde Framework.
It can, as the snippet states, primarily be used to store contact data, e. g. for shared and/or personal address books. Some applications can store user-specific configuration data in IMSP as well.
There are just three problems with it:
1. IMSP itself is obsolete since LDAP. Anything that can be done with IMSP can be done better in LDAP.
2. (Cyrus-)IMSP never worked reliably and consistently for me.
3. “Few applications” is an understatement. I’ve tried hard to find another use for IMSP besides Horde - and failed.
I’ve long abandoned IMSP for those three reasons.
I’d say: Perform the last rites!
Carnegie Mellon University (the place that made Cyrus) took their IMSP servers offline in January. The only client I know of that used it was Mulberry, and the company that made that went bankrupt 2 years ago. So, I doubt that anyone there is going to be doing any more maintenance on it again.