Sieve bytecode vs plaintext configuration files

[emdeex]

I've been running Cyrus-imapd on Mandriva Linux for a few years now
and all is well with the basic server.  But sieveshell has never
worked despite various attempts.

For the new year, I'm making another attempt at getting sieve to work.
 Sieveshell has problems, so I want to just manually put the sieve
files into each user directory.

I've got user home directories for each user, so I've set sieveusehomedir: true

I've put a test sieve script ~/.sieve in the users home directory.
There is no complaint in the logs, but the mail is not processed
according to the sieve rules.

Is it that I can't just write plaintext .sieve files, that they have
to be bytecode?  If so, how can I do this without sieveshell?

Thanks for any advice...
emdx