Vincent Lefevre wrote in <20200510204809.ga71...@zira.vinc17.org>: |Related to commit 7bd57bc3c24adf97f1f57bd6bb2fd18347f8cbbd, is |dotlocking still used nowadays?
I find yes. Or at least last i looked, some MTAs aka MDA or whatever the right name is (LDA? postfix (configurable), i think OpenBSDs mail.local (which saw heavy modifications lately though)) create these files, and then i think it seems sensible to embed in this locking strategy. That is what i use for my MUA, though on OpenBSD, MacOS and some others (Fedora at least) OPT_DOTLOCK is disabled, and on Debian the maintainer has made the dotlock helper a SETGID instead of a SETUID program, which should be enough for the plain Debian mailspool, however. |Even if it is, I find annoying that for an end user who probably |won't need it, Mutt's installation will fail if he does not provide |the --with-homespool option. | |Let's recall that dotlocking alone is not safe with some file systems, |such as NFS, since even if the client has an exclusive access to the |mailbox file, there is no guarantee that the synchronization will be |done before another program accesses the mailbox. In short, a working |fcntl locking is needed. But if it is available, then dotlocking is |useless. So, IMHO, if still supported, dotlocking should just be seen |as a fallback, and if mutt_dotlock cannot be installed with the right |permissions, the installation of Mutt should not fail. I do not think so. fcntl is "the new way" and used anyway (for my MUA), but embedding into the scheme used by others is crucial, and as long as they use dotlock files for synchronization i will use it. NFS locking is "now" ok i have heard (here "now" is maybe almost two decades), but i got a lot of test errors on the OpenCSW cluster i have access to in the last year or so, because the NFS creates a hidden file for each file it creates (links), maybe, but anyway the rm(1) we do on the test file is not reflected fast enough for the hidden (dot) file, i got "wrong link count" failures there. That is, bugs are everywhere. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)
