Re: Bug#43529: debian-policy: mail locking in Debian is _not_ NFS safe

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Raul Miller <raul@usatoday.com> writes:

> Can we get liblockfile's program an routines to reliably *fail* when
> it's locking an nfs file?
> 
> If so, perhaps we can recommend Maildir/ for people who need to 
> put mail on an nfs partition.
> 
> The bad side of this is that it requires some very specific documentation,
> and it's an extra admin headache for people using mail on NFS.  The good
> aspects are:  (1) only affects people stuck with mail on NFS, and (2)
> people on those systems wouldn't lose mail to NFS "features".

Maildir is better for people that are paranoid about loosing mail on
local disks as well.  The only disadvantage with Maildir that I know
of is the fact that it needs an inode per message.

It strikes me that we need a configuration file
(/etc/mail-delivery-default or some such) which specifies where the
system's mail programs should look for a user's mail by default.

Once all the mail programs support this, we could contemplate
switching the Debian default to ~/Maildir/, without upsetting the many
people that would prefer /var/spool/mail/<user> mbox format.

Cheers, Phil.