Subject: Re: fhs

From: [email-masked]
Date: 16 Aug 1996 19:06:45 -0000

> >      echo $HOME/Mailbox >$HOME/.forward

Richard Kettlewell:
> This is a bad idea if the home directory is NFS-mounted from a remote
> system; IME file locking under NFS is very easy to get wrong.  (Not
> that all mailers get locking right even on local file systems...)

This is a symptom of flaws in NFS and in the standard unix mailbox
format.  One possibility is to go to a more robust format (e.g.
qmail's Maildir).  Another possibility is to live with NFS's failures
:-(

However, my point was that /var/mail is somewhat broken -- that it's a
viable workaround for other brokenness doesn't get rid of this
underlying point.  I'd like to see it treated as a standard of
marginal importance...
 
> Additionally, a system might well have different backup or quota
> policies for mail and ordinary user data, which is a good reason to
> keep them separate.

This tends to result in people mailing files to themselves (mail quota
larger than regular quota) or reaping the mailbox frequently (mail quota
smaller than regular quota).  You might say that reaping the mailbox
frequently is a good thing because it keeps the mail spool from
getting full.  This isn't even worth discussing.

-- 
Raul

---

From: Richard Kettlewell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 96 14:58:03 +0100 (BST)

>qmail's Maildir).  Another possibility is to live with NFS's failures

I think we'll be stuck with NFS's flaws for a while yet; to ignore
them would be unwise.  The same remark applies to mailbox formats,
though that should be easier to fix - I've not looked at qmail so I
have no opinion on whether it's done it well.

-- 
Richard Kettlewell   [email-masked]   [email-masked]
                             http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/