Sam wrote: >> What is the reason to use soft links in the shared folders? >> >> I would think that hardlinks (with an independance of file >> permissions on >> the original file) would provide advantages from a group >> membership and maintenance point of view... > >The sharable mailbox may be on a different filesystem.
I was 99% certain you were goign to say that... and a valid consideration - so to avoid breaking things we'd probably have to allow the possibiliy of both unless people were sure they didn't need the softlink option (./configure option?) >> COULD the shared folder softlink be changed to hardlinks? Would >> it be a BIG change? > >First of all, there needs to be a good reason for a change. >"Just for the heck of it" isn't going to cut the mustard. Of course. Should go without saying but often needs to be said anyways ;-) Seriously though I think there are reasons to consider the change - it's a matter of whether or not the impact is worth it. 1) copied messages could be handled with hardlinks instead of copies, resulting in less data transfer and less data storage 2) shared folders could be accessed without reliance on common group membership (which admittedly could be more than a "simple" softlink -> hardlink change). Shared folders by hardlink would be faster (by how much?) without having to resolve the soft link, but the permissions issue was more of a problem for me before and I see it as a happy coincidense of changing to a hardlink based system. On FreeBSD 4.x (maybe this is different elsewhere, so I note it here for later arguments ;-) one can maintain hardlinks to a single file with completely different ownership information. i.e. touch stuff1 chown user1:user2 stuff1 chmod 700 stuff1 ln stuff1 stuff2 chown user1:user1 stuff2 chmod 700 stuff2 two names, one file, completely different and independant owners / groups, ONE data file. On BSD there are limits to the number of groups a user can belong to, which can be increased by rebuilding a custom kernel (16 is the limit I think) which unfortunately limits the complexity of managing shared mailing lists... you can't have each list be a group, or people run out of group membership options. Changing the limit is cautioned against without a makeworld and also the warning that some applications MAY have been hardcoded to the original value. of course with alternative authentication systems (mysql) this can probably be bypassed, but I was never confident that one wouldn't end up bumping into the OS limit at some point as the daemon tried to access files it would rely on the OS environment of permissions one it sets that user id... With hardlinks, a user can own their own copy of their messages which just HAPPEN to be linked to the shared copy. am I making sense? what do you think? m/ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
