On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:45:35 EDT, Ken Hornstein said:
Tell your vendor to rebuild the package with fcntl locking. nmh uses dot locking by default, which is pretty brain dead. Here is the option they should give configure: --with-locking=fcntl So the question becomes, is there a reason we shouldn't fix configure to use fcntl locking by default, and only fall back to dot locking if fcntl locking isn't available?It does boggle the mind why /dev/null is being locked _at all_. I did try to track this down once, and it was a maze of functions ... I was running low on time and I just switched to fcntl locking, but seriously this probably should be fixed.
I remember chasing this down once upon a time as well, because it gave
exmh indigestion at startup. it was this crud in uip/scansbr.c:
if (outnum) {
if (outnum > 0) {
scnmsg = m_name (outnum);
if (*scnmsg == '?') /* msg num out of range */
return SCNNUM;
} else {
scnmsg = "/dev/null";
}
And later on, code assumes that scnmsg points at a mail file that needs to
be scanned.. so it locks the file totally oblivious to the fact it's not a
mail file under ~/Mail/ - whoops.. ;)
(I forget how that code got called with a negative number in outnum, but
it was some fairly easy to trigger condition....)
The reason dot locking is the default is because until fairly recently,
fcntl locking wasn't a trustable option over NFS.
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