On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:56:52PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. > > 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.
Or they don't use root at all for the MDA, instead setuid'ing to the user itself. See also #405584. -- 2. That which causes joy or happiness. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]