On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 11:53:32PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > Please think about it and stay with /var/spool/mail. > > Right now, /var/mail and /var/spool/mail both suffer the same problem: > whichever is used, some people need to use the other, hence it is a > *requirement* that both can be used by programs.
If think that /var/spool should indicate that the data can grow very large. That is the case for mail and so /var/spool to not too wrong. It is fact that Linux distributions currently only use /var/spool/mail. > > Given that, it is better to use /var/mail, because the mail inbox > directory is *not* a spool (a daemon transshipment point -- the mail > *spool* is /var/spool/mqueue.) Putting it under /var/spool causes But the real spool dir shouldn't matter for this standard. The MTA should be free to use another dir than /var/spool/mqueue/. That's just what sendmail uses. > disk space management problems. It is normal admin work to symlink a dir to another partition if you have the need for it. Update progs should be smart enough to handel this. I fail to see why /var/mail should be superior from a technical standpoint. Can you explain why /var/spool/mail is worse than /var/mail for any disk space management problems? If you'd said that Solaris uses /var/mail and maybe other documents use this as the standard mail spool, then I'd says yes: If we currently had all distributions use /var/mail, I'd see no reason to move to /var/spool/mail. I can also see some points why /var/mail would be a better standard point if we would make a "new" decision about this. But Linux has a large user base now and after the move from /var/spool/mail to /var/mail, we would not have gained a lot. So why do it? There are reasons why all distributions stayed with /var/spool/mail. Even Debian who also thinks a lot about making things sane/clean has stayed with /var/spool/mail. This standardization project should be documenting the current state and the current movement. This will bring the Linux distributions together and manifest the (global) movement to a standard Linux system. I don't see any reason this project should dictate completely new things to the different Linux distributions. They already do their best to improve it. Florian La Roche
