Subject: Re: Draft manuals

From: Raul Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Aug 1996 21:32:40 -0000

http://chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk/~ian/policy.html/ch-binarypkg.html says:

   3.8.3 Mail processing on Debian systems 

   Debian packages which process electronic mail (whether
   mail-user-agents (MUA) or mail-transport-agents (MTA)) must make sure
   that they are compatible with the configuration decisions
   below. Failure to do this may result in lost mail, broken From: lines,
   and other serious brain damage!

   The mail spool is /var/spool/mail and the interface to send a mail
   message is /usr/sbin/sendmail (as per the FSSTND). The mail spool is
   part of the base system and not part of the MTA package.

   Mailboxes are locked using the username.lock lockfile convention,
   rather than fcntl, flock or lockf.

......................................................................

Some thought about qmail should occur here.

qmail doesn't use a mail spool directory for security reasons, mail
boxes are in the user's home directory by default.  And, of course,
there's the maildir format for people wanting a very robust system.

I've seen mention on debian-devel of making movemail aware of
maildir.  I suspect that this is the right thing to do.

-- 
Raul

---

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 96 23:35 BST

Raul Miller writes ("Re: Draft manuals"):
> Some thought about qmail should occur [in the section on
> mail processing].
> 

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.

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.

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.

Ian.