Bug#42052: Bug#45052: [OLD PROPOSAL] /var/mail and /var/spool/mail

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

I was looking through old proposals, and saw this one.  It discusses
changing policy to refer to /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail.  The
discussion sort of hung, but in the meantime, events have overtaken
it: both base-files and libc6 essentially do the following:

if /var/spool/mail is a directory, then symlink /var/mail to it
otherwise /var/mail is a directory, and symlink /var/spool/mail to it

In fact, base-files follows the FHS and makes /var/mail the mail spool
on new systems.  But more than that, the FHS specifically does not
require /var/mail to be the mail directory itself; it may be a
symlink, typically to /var/spool/mail.

So this proposal really ought to go in to policy, as it represents
current practice.

Here is the suggested change:

Section 12.6: the para which currently reads:

   The mail spool is `/var/spool/mail' and the interface to send a mail
   message is `/usr/sbin/sendmail' (as per the FHS).  ...

should be changed to:

   The mail spool is `/var/mail' and the interface to send a mail
   message is /usr/sbin/sendmail (as per the FHS).  On older systems,
   the mail spool may be physically located in /var/spool/mail, but
   all access to the mail spool should be via the /var/mail symlink.

A new section 10.1.3 should be inserted into policy:

  10.1.3 The system-wide mail directory

   The system-wide mail directory is /var/mail.  This directory is
   part of the base system and should not owned by any particular mail
   agents.  The use of the old location /var/spool/mail is deprecated,
   even though the spool may still be physically located there.  To
   maintain partial upgrade compatibility for systems which have
   /var/spool/mail as their physical mail spool, packages using
   /var/mail > must depend on either libc6 (>= 2.1.3-13), or on
   base-files (>= 2.2.0), or on later versions of either one of these
   packages.

Comments, seconds anyone?

   Julian

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         Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
       Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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