Hi, I noticed that during this discussion two issues that are not intrinsically related keep on getting tied together:
1) Reliable file locking, including over NFS 2) Reliable mail delivery to users' inboxes I cannot claim to be an expert on NFS locking, but I have a fairly strong feeling that 1) is almost impossible. Of course, if it is possible then I think we should do the Unix community a great service by providing an easy to use library, as has been suggested. Regardless of whether 1) is attainable, 2) is _not_ possible by use of locks alone. The reasons for this are covered in a fair amount of detail in the qmail documentation, but boil down to the fact that it is possible to corrupt a conventional mbox by writing a partial message to the end. If we are serious about changing our mail delivery policy, then I think we should seriously consider moving to Maildir delivery as our default, with dot-locking as a required alternative (for backwards compatibility). Maildir delivery does not need any locking to be performed, and allows multiple processes to create/modify/delete mail messages simultaneously without the possibility of inbox corruption. No deadlocks or stale locks can occur because no locking is required. I think we need to write two libraries: 1) libnfslock (or whatever) 2) libmailaccess (or whatever) libmailaccess should be something like PAM for mail delivery, providing access to a user's mailbox by use of either Maildir, or dot-locking (via libnfslock say), or whatever other method --- as selected by the user. Cheers, Phil. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
