Re: Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian
>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
Steve> Qmail does not value the contents of a bounce
Steve> message. Dan documents this in a subordinate clause of his
Steve> qmail reliability FAQ. That means: if your qmail is
Steve> bouncing mail and at the same time, your system crashes,
Steve> the bounce mail contents may be corrupt or incomplete.
Steve> This sounds like data loss, which is normally considered a
Steve> grave bug per <http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer>. Do
Steve> people disagree that this is a grave bug? If you think
Steve> it's a grave bug, do you think it should be a blocker for
Steve> archive inclusion?
Steve, I'm not on the TC. However I do have a fair bit of experience
with Internet standards and what sorts of guarantees Internet
protocols make to their users about reliability. If you take a look
at the bottom of Page 19 of RFC 3461 you will find that an MTA is
permitted to return a partial bounce message.
While I'll admit that returning corrupted bounce messages is kind of
ugly, I'm failing to see how it could be grave if returning a message
truncated earlier would be just fine. Personally, I think that
returning corrupting bounce messages would be a bug although I would
not mind too much if a maintainer tagged it wontfix.
However, one form of corruption would be more serious. If bounce
messages may include contents of other messages, or random memory
possibly including security sensitive memory, then that would be an RC
bug of some form in my mind.
--Sam
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