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

[t.sippel-dau@ic.ac.uk]

The keyboard of Kragen Sitaker emitted at some point in time:
> 
> On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Theodore Y. Ts'o 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?

Hmm, and a mandatory symlink form $LOGNAME/Mailbox to /var/mail/$LOGNAME,
and we will have established FHS compliant systems as those "where email
won't work any more".

N.B. your phrasing was not POSIX compliant, tut, tut, tut. A good example
how technically simple and conceptually irrelevant changes (from USER to
LOGNAME) are still extremely dificult to achieve in practice.

> 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.

Pain of no real benefit to the end user, as long as "it works".

>  Distributing applications to millions of
> people, some of whom use one convention, and some of whom use another,
> is surely asking for trouble.

Yes, it is. arguing about it will make mpore pain.

                                Thomas

*   Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ?
*
*   email: cmaae47 @ imperial.ac.uk