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

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

   From: Florian La Roche <florian@suse.de>
   Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 10:44:20 +0100

   How can changing from /var/spool/mail to /var/mail be a "full
   solution" for the next years to come?  Many people think that the
   mail-dir solution that e.g. qmail and mutt support is the real
   solution for the future. Maybe future Linux distributions want to
   ship that as a default? They couldn't be compliant with this standard
   even though they use a more modern mail-storing setup.  The change
   from /var/spool/mail can be done on any system with an "ln -s
   spool/mail /var/mail". Why mix up all Linux users instead of keeping
   this a local solution anybody can do?

Most Mail User Agents for standard Unix systems look in /var/mail/<user>
for the user's mailbox.  So if qmail is switching to ~/Mailbox, then
they have to solve the problem for all of the various MUA's out there,
and that is really qmail's and mutt's problem.  I assume someone in that
community must have thought about the problem, since people generally
don't react well when they're told that they can't use their favorite
mail reader because some new mail system has decided to use a different
mailbox convention.  

   So maybe any standard should not say something about the mail spool dir?

Well, the problem is what happens if a third-party wants to ship a mail
user agent?  If how you get mail on a system is a distribution-local
thing, that means that only the distribution-provided mail readers have
a chance of working correctly.  The whole point of the LSB effort was to
allow this kind of third-party application provider to be able to work
across different Linux systems, and not have certain applications that
only work on RedHat systems, but not Debian systems, or vice versa.

						- Ted