Sunil Shetye <shetye(_at_)bombay(_dot_)retortsoft(_dot_)com>:
Quoting from Benjamin Drieu's mail on Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 12:09:06AM +0200:
here is a patch to fix Debian bug #212240 [1]. A small bug was
introduced in 6.2.4 that prevent oversized messages to be flushed if
both "flush" and "limit" were specified.
[ Ralph Seichter had also complained about this change, however I
could not explain then why this change is required. ]
There are a few reasons why 'flush' should not be used to delete
oversized messages.
- 'limit' is a resource limit control option, 'flush' is not. Using
the two in combination is neither safe nor intuitive. 'flush' is
specifically for deleting old seen mails. Overloading it is
dangerous.
I agree with this argument, and have accepted the patch.
- Currently, there is a serious bug in the uidl code where unseen
messages are marked as seen under specific options. I have attempted
to fix it in the thread "fetching uids of mails". If a user has
specified 'flush' to delete oversized mails by default, such mails
will also get deleted! If one has the following rc file,
I have never trusted the UIDL code. I didn't write it, and it is
sufficiently ugly and complicated that I don't think I understand it
completely. This is a major reason I have resisted Matthias Andree's
plan to move to UIDL tracking.
I suggest that a resource control option like 'limitflush <number>' be
added. If acceptable, I could make a patch for this.
I am very resistant to adding new options at this point. I would
prefer to remove the size limit option entirely and ship a separate
mini-client for deleting oversized messages.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>