Re: SMTP + Threads support

[Jules Bean <jmlb2 hermes cam ac uk>]

On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 09:58:01AM +0100, Pawel Salek wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 12:06:47 Héctor García Álvarez wrote:
> > I just made a commit to the cvs which should make the SMTP work fine 
> > with the queue.
> 
> The bad news is that balsa does not compile now when the threads are
> disabled: for example, sending_mail is used in libbalsa/send.c but not
> defined. This is likely not a big deal since the threaded code seems to 
> be 
> pretty stably but might be frightening for a beginner.

The point about threads was that not everyone had a stable version, IIRC --
people back on glibc 2.0 or libc5 don't. And we didn't want to make balsa
inaccessible to those types.  Maybe not a problem any more (Stuart? Peter?)

> 
> I have accidentally noticed balsa uses fcntl locks and refuses to work
> without them. fcntl locks rarely work reliably over NFS (I have some bad
> experience) and sometimes are not available at all. This practically
> renders balsa useless on systems with NFS mounted home directory. OTOH,
> accessing mailbox in a NFS-mounted directory has always been a hassle...

Debian has a policy on this to use 'liblockfile' which is NFS aware.  All
MUAs have to use liblockfile on debian (balsa has escaped simply because no
one has yet noticed and reported the bug, I expect).

> 
> /Pawel
> PS. I also think that the "Local main user agent" entry in preferences
> is misleading: if it  is supposed to mean sendmail, it should be local
> mail transport agent.

You're right, that's an error.

I would suggest "Local (sendmail compatible) MTA" as a good one.

Jules

-- 
Jules Bean                          |        Any sufficiently advanced 
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk}  |  technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk              |               from a perl script