Hi Eric,
on june 19th I wrote a message to this list with a patch for a bug
where
fetchmail quits directly after startup if one of the servers to poll
is
not in dns ("couldn't find canonical DNS name of xxx").
[...]
I'm having a design-philosophy problem with this. When fetchmail fails,
I
want it to fail noisily so the responsible persion can notice and fix
the
problem. Your change would make it fail invisibly when running in
background
(which I consider the important case).
...and in the background-mode the users won't get bitten by the problem of
a
temporarily failing nameserver because the code we are talking about is
only
for startup (before the fork).
So I suggest
either not doing any lookups at startup in foregound-mode
or doing lookups at startup (as it is now) but disable the exit(PS_DNS)
for
foreground-mode
I thought this over again. Now I suggest my original patch:
- the problem also exists in background-mode: you can't start bg-mode if one
nameserver
is down. And what is the first reaction if you don't get any mail: restart
fetchmail...
- if you are running in bg-mode you usually check the log when running for
the first time
- if you have a typo not in the servername but in e.g. the password (what I
consider much
more likely...) you won't get any "noisy fail" - so you already have to
check the logs with
the current version
-> my patch fixes a bug affecting in fg- and bg-mode
-> the patch won't make it harder to detect failures: you already have to
check the logs to
make sure it works
Regards,
Gerd