Subject: Re: Draft manuals (qmail)

From: Raul Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Aug 1996 00:13:11 -0000

On 9 Aug, Ian Jackson wrote:
> qmail's author has taken a deliberate choice to be incompatible with
> things, and this means that we can either:
>  * mandate that everything support what qmail does
>  * live with not everything working when you use qmail.

But qmail does more than one thing so these statements are ambiguous.

> What precisely do you think I should put in the policy manual on
> this subject ?  I'm loath to mandate that every program support
> qmail's maildir format.

qmail's maildir format is not its default.  Yet I think we can
recommend some policies that would allow programs to support maildir
without having to be aware of maildir.  [e.g. run maildir2mbox from
a user's crontab -- this extreme only makes sense if user directories
are mounted from NFS.]

> Perhaps the qmail package should come with a local delivery agent
> that can do delivery into /var/spool/mail ?  It only has to be
> setgid mail, not setuid root.  That requirement would be the effect
> of the policy requirements as they're written atm.

Perhaps it's reasonable to specify that every mail aware program
supports the MAIL environmental variable.  As qmail's default behavior
is to deliver mail to ~user/Mailbox in standard unix mailbox format,
this should suffice.

Additional recommendations or specifications which open the door to
maildir compatability (e.g. that movemail be used to retrieve locally
stored mail -- allowing, at worst, the administrator to set policy by
replacing movemail) might also be reasonable.

-- 
Raul

---

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 96 18:17 BST

Raul Miller writes ("Re: Draft manuals (qmail)"):
...
> is to deliver mail to ~user/Mailbox in standard unix mailbox format,

But does it use the same locking strategy as our other mailers ?

> replacing movemail) might also be reasonable.

This can't be done sensibly for mailers like mailx, Elm and Pine which
manipulate and leave messages in the inbox, and incurs extra delay
with (eg) mh.

Ian.