Re: LSB Spec 1.0 Criticism
>From: Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de>
>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...
If an application will really write into the main mail folder, then
it must know the official locking rules for mail files.
If Linix did not yet learn how to do record locking over NFS, then
it will most likely fail. Note that a mail program creates a file
~/.Maillock with an advisory record lock to check whether/how it may
write into the mail file (this is in addition to /var/mail/{user}.lock)
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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