Re: [HC Evolution] mbox locking

[Dan Winship <danw helixcode com>]

> Dot-locking works everywhere you care about, so at best, fcntl will be
> redundant, and at worst, it will cause a crash or deadlock.  Stay away.

I should have mentioned this before, but Pine does it both ways. Some
BSD programs do too.

> Emacs's movemail is extra crappy.  The code is very hard to read,
> because there's lots of legacy in there for systems that nobody has 
> used for a decade, and that you surely don't care about.

Yeah, I just figured if I didn't suggest using Emacs's then people
would say I was a bad free software hacker. :)

> Netscape has an option to use the built-in movemail, or to use an
> external movemail program (e.g., the emacs movemail.)  You should
> do this; it's a good idea.

That's the plan.

> > I especially don't like #4 since in the process of investigating this
> > stuff, I discovered that my MH install was only using dot locking and
> > my sendmail was only using fcntl locking.
>
> This is very surprising -- how did your sendmail end up that way?
> Are you sure?  Are you really really sure?

I can't figure out whether it's an accident or not. Note that the
movemail.html URL you mentioned says that BSDI does only fcntl-locking
as well. Anyway, for 4.4BSD systems, sendmail delivers mail with
"/usr/libexec/mail.local -d $USER", and on NetBSD, mail.local defaults
to fcntl-only. (On FreeBSD, /usr/libexec/mail.local is actually the
sendmail mail.local rather than the 4.4BSD mail.local, and it does
both kinds of locking.)

-- Dan