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Re: [Nmh-workers] dot locking broken?

2015-02-12 11:40:18
Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
But I have to ask why someone would want to run things this way.  BSD
systems - by definition - use flock() in /var/mail.  If you run MH with
dot locking for /var/mail, you're eventually going to lose mail, since
the MDA will still use flock(), even if you don't.  Not to mention other
tools in ports that will be assuming flock() for /var/mail.

I know the user was on FreeBSD, but a quick googling shows me that there
are a number of places that use dot-locking on the mail spool.  Also,
it sounded like Martin was just testing things.  Seems reasonable to
make it work.

My MDA (local mailer of sendmail) actually is very nice - it respects
the dot lock put in /var/mail. While I was testing what is going on
having a .lock in the folder nicely put off delivery.

Which actually lead me to another thought: maybe we should
at least _respect_ dot lock (i.e. do not allow writing to a dotlocked
file) but create dot lock only if that particular locking is
requested.

A quick look at the mail.local source code makes me believe
that it actually first creates a .lock file and then proceeds
with flock(). So it uses two kinds of locking at the same time.

//Marcin


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