Re: LSB Spec 1.0 Criticism
On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 08:41:02AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > their web pages are themselves (/var/www, file:/var/www/foo.html). It's
> > not unreasonable for software to want to send mail, but that would mean
> > it'd need to use /usr/sbin/sendmail, not write to /var/mail/* directly.
>
> Think about mail _client_ applications. Elm, mutt etc do need to know where
> mail lives and do write back to it
No, they don't. They _MUST_ ask during installation. Period.
There are some quite common setups (eq. cyrus imapd or UW imapd in
black box mode) where applications have no business accessing the
mail spool directly. Even if you have an accessible mail spool the
application still can not make assumptions because it does not know
anything about the semantics of the mailspool. Does it use MBOX format
or not? (Granted, not using MBOX format is quite uncommon. But it
does happen!) Is it located on a network volume? (Can you say "file
locking"?) And so on...
As with any standard devised by committee, the LSB suffers from featurism
and over-regulation...
Dominik
--
A lovely thing to see: Kobayashi Issa
through the paper window's holes (1763-1828)
the galaxy. [taken from: David Brin - Sundiver]
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