On Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:56:52 -0700, Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Josip Rodin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Okay, given that I see no rationale for the sentence "Mailboxes must
>> be writable by group mail.", I'm reassigning this to debian-policy.
>>
>> There is an ancient bug #24772 that was closed without a proper
>> justification (it appears to have been rejected because it was in
>> limbo with regard to the policy process).
> I don't know what the original Debian rationale was, but the
> traditional UNIX rationale for group-writable user mail spools is so
> that you don't have to run your mail system as root and can instead
> run it as some other user in group mail.
If memory serves me correctly, this was indeed the reason behind
the rule.
> However, everyone seems to have given up on that or at least uses a
> setuid-root MDA, so I'm not sure it's serving any real purpose at this
> point.
Really? I am surprised. Making MDA's suid root seems to be
inherently more risky (I use mailagent, which is not suid anything, so
I am out of touch with the state of the art in MDA's).
manoj
--
I stick my neck out for nobody. Humphrey Bogart, "Casablanca"
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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