On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Santiago Vila <sanv...@unex.es> wrote:

> I just wanted to comment on your reply: IMHO, the idea that sysadmins
> should build procmail and perform compile time tests may make sense in
> a *general* way, but IMHO it does not fit very well with Debian spirit.
>

I understand that.  I am an avid user of Debian myself, since 1995.


> In Debian, it was determined a long time ago that the correct way to
> perform locking was fcntl() + dot locking, which apparently is the thing
> that works well (or the only thing that has some possibility to work)
> with Linux.
>

That is fine.  But then special care should be taken to correctly configure
NFS mounts to either simply work with fcntl locks, or fail without
hanging.  Once procmail has to lock, the fcntl can either succeed, fail or
hang indefinitely.  Once it hangs indefinitely, procmail has no means to
fix it.


> In general, asking users that they should build their own packages is
> contrary to Debian philosophy. Our job is precisely (among other things)
> trying to avoid that.
>

Well, I wasn't asking that, I was just remarking that after procmail has
been compiled, there is not a lot of leeway to fix things at runtime.
-- 
Stephen.

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