Re: [Nmh-workers] dot locking broken?

[Marcin Cieslak]

>> Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> wrote:
>>But I have to ask why someone would want to run things this way.  BSD
>>systems - by definition - use flock() in /var/mail.  If you run MH with
>>dot locking for /var/mail, you're eventually going to lose mail, since
>>the MDA will still use flock(), even if you don't.  Not to mention other
>>tools in ports that will be assuming flock() for /var/mail.
>
> I know the user was on FreeBSD, but a quick googling shows me that there
> are a number of places that use dot-locking on the mail spool.  Also,
> it sounded like Martin was just testing things.  Seems reasonable to
> make it work.

My MDA (local mailer of sendmail) actually is very nice - it respects
the dot lock put in /var/mail. While I was testing what is going on
having a .lock in the folder nicely put off delivery.

Which actually lead me to another thought: maybe we should
at least _respect_ dot lock (i.e. do not allow writing to a dotlocked
file) but create dot lock only if that particular locking is
requested.

A quick look at the mail.local source code makes me believe
that it actually first creates a .lock file and then proceeds
with flock(). So it uses two kinds of locking at the same time.

//Marcin