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Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0



On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 07:09:34PM -0500, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> > If we must back out /var/mail (for no good technical reason that I can
> > determine), then at the very least I think we should state that there
> > that for all compliant distributions, /var/mail *MUST* be a valid way of
> > reaching the spool directory (i.e., there should be a symlink there, or
> > where the spool directory actually lives)
> 
> If you include this change, will using ~/Mailbox violate the FHS?  Does
> it already?  Should it?  Should we require symlinks from
> /var/mail/$USER to ~$USER/Mailbox?

I still want to know what /var/mail gains us over /var/spool/mail.  I've
asked many times of many people and all I have gotten back is that it's
an issue of style or that mail isn't a spool (which I disagreed with).. 
I am curious for the answer to this, so far I have heard "/var/mail is
good and we all know it's good but the dists don't agree."  So I ask in
front of all of everybody in the hopes that maybe the answer will make
sense, what technical reason is there for change now?

If you want my opinion as I am SURE everybody does, /var/anything/mail is
probably a bad plan from a least privileges standpoint.  Qmail users are
not the only people out there with ~/Mailbox setups and there are good
reasons why, starting with security.  The only argument against this I
have ever seen is that not all mail users have home directories.  While
my machine is single-user and this isn't a problem for me, I have seen a
few solutions to it.



> Switching a single one-user system to ~/Mailbox is easy, btw.
> Switching a single multi-user system to ~/Mailbox is likely to cause a
> certain amount of pain.  Distributing applications to millions of
> people, some of whom use one convention, and some of whom use another,
> is surely asking for trouble.

And then you have people who use MH or Maildir instead of traditional
mbox.  The only way to REALLY deal with it sanely is to read $MAIL and
see what it says, I suspect.

-- 
"I'm working in the dark here."  "Yeah well rumor has it you do your best
work in the dark."
                               -- Earth: Final Conflict


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