[Evolution] Re: Evo 0.8 & NFS

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

John Affleck <jaffleck ping ne mediaone net> writes:

> 1 - A mix of locally mounted and NFS mounted home directories.  It
> seems that one would like to use fcntl for the locals and perhaps
> flock or something else for the NFS.

No.  You always want to use fcntl, because fcntl can lock on both
local and NFS, and flock can only lock locally.  

> 2 - A change from an NFS mounted directory to a local one.  Do you
> really want to recompile Evolution to support this ?

You don't have to.  Again, fcntl will do both local and NFS locks.

> And just as a general note, (and please don't take this as a flame),
> if Evolution is targeted at the desktop or the 'kinder, gentler
> Linux', is having something as 'user' specific as locking a compile
> time only option the right thing to do ?

Yes, it is the right thing to do.

The user should not have to worry about locks at all.  The reason for
locking isn't just for Evolution, but so it won't read or write mail
spools while other programs are doing so.  For that reason, it needs
to use the same locking as the rest of the system.  That makes it a
distribution matter, and users shouldn't mess with it.  (As shown
here, most users don't understand locking well enough to make the
right decisions.)

Let me repeat: there is _no_ problem using fcntl on NFS-mounted
directories, if you have an NFS server which supports locking.  And if
you don't have one, you should get one before recompiling Evolution to
turn off locking (ie, use flock on NFS), because without locking you
will probably lose mail.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats acm org> - In a variety of flavors!
Veni, Vidi, Visa - I came, I saw, I charged it