I was looking through old proposals, and saw this one. It discusses
changing policy to refer to /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail. The
discussion sort of hung, but in the meantime, events have overtaken
it: both base-files and libc6 essentially do the following:
if /var/spool/mail is a directory, then symlink /var/mail to it
otherwise /var/mail is a directory, and symlink /var/spool/mail to it
In fact, base-files follows the FHS and makes /var/mail the mail spool
on new systems. But more than that, the FHS specifically does not
require /var/mail to be the mail directory itself; it may be a
symlink, typically to /var/spool/mail.
So this proposal really ought to go in to policy, as it represents
current practice.
Here is the suggested change:
Section 12.6: the para which currently reads:
The mail spool is `/var/spool/mail' and the interface to send a mail
message is `/usr/sbin/sendmail' (as per the FHS). ...
should be changed to:
The mail spool is `/var/mail' and the interface to send a mail
message is /usr/sbin/sendmail (as per the FHS). On older systems,
the mail spool may be physically located in /var/spool/mail, but
all access to the mail spool should be via the /var/mail symlink.
A new section 10.1.3 should be inserted into policy:
10.1.3 The system-wide mail directory
The system-wide mail directory is /var/mail. This directory is
part of the base system and should not owned by any particular mail
agents. The use of the old location /var/spool/mail is deprecated,
even though the spool may still be physically located there. To
maintain partial upgrade compatibility for systems which have
/var/spool/mail as their physical mail spool, packages using
/var/mail > must depend on either libc6 (>= 2.1.3-13), or on
base-files (>= 2.2.0), or on later versions of either one of these
packages.
Comments, seconds anyone?
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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