How much larger will the final image be with these changes?

How much larger will the final image be with these changes?

My local build is 870MB vs. latest release 616MB.
The issue with the community builds of dovecot is that any plugin needs to be built again with that version.

The only way I see to avoid image bloat is to split the docker build: First install dovecot from community, compile fts_xapian, build a .deb.

Then next step the full build copying only the dep from the first build.

But that would be a larger change.

Probably uninstalling the build dep packages will help a bit. I'll try that.

Good idea! Because 870MB is definitely too large. The multi-stage build may be the best option, but it'd be nice if you tinker a bit around 👍🏼

Good idea! Because 870MB is definitely too large. The multi-stage build may be the best option, but it'd be nice if you tinker a bit around 👍🏼

removing deps brings it down to 700MB

Perhaps put it behind a build flag? 80MB is a lot of extra weight for a feature not many are using AFAIK? (definitely better than 870MB at least) Not ideal since it requires users that do want the feature to build the image themselves though..

With Fedora and OpenSUSE this is easier at least, but I'm not that familiar with Debian. Would there be any way to reduce the image weight further?

• The situation might change with the upcoming Debian Bookworm release next month? (Dovecot community build could be made opt-in if it's new enough, and thus the two may be compatible by default meeting most users needs?)
• We could defer the build to a separate stage and build / tag releases with that (but I don't think this one feature warrants that, plus it'd affect our own limited CI cache storage)
• Changing base image has been discussed in the past which may also resolve the issue (eg: Fedora releases more frequently and isn't holding back package updates like how Bookworm will still be stuck on PostSRSd <2), however most active maintainers are in favour of sticking with Debian.

One other concern with compiling is the CI ARM builds would probably suffer a fair bit from that until Github offers actual ARM runners instead of emulating ARM via QEMU. Hopefully with build cache that shouldn't be too frequent of a problem.

• fts-xapian-1.5.5 (dir)
• dovecot-fts-xapian.tar.gz (file)

Those can be deleted after compilation?

Are the *-dev packages needed after compilation?

the new patch brings it down to 619MB, but it changes the Dockerfile structure. Is this an acceptable solution?

@casperklein you can go ahead and merge this when all is well and you approve

Is the dovecot-dev package needed after compilation?

Is the dovecot-dev package needed after compilation?

It contains the headers and /usr/share/dovecot/dovecot-abi - i am not 100% sure if the latter is needed. But it is just about 300kb.

Just for the record, ~3MB, not 300kb 😉

root@mail:/# aptitude show dovecot-dev
Package: dovecot-dev
Version: 2:2.3.20-3+debian11
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 3431 k

Just for the record, ~3MB, not 300kb 😉

oh, you are right. i looked up the wrong version. let me test if it works without the -dev.

Is the dovecot-dev package needed after compilation?

works without the -dev package. i changed the build. image size 619MB->618MB