On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 04:26:25PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Okay, given that I see no rationale for the sentence "Mailboxes must be > > writable by group mail.", I'm reassigning this to debian-policy. > > Here is a proposed change to loosen this requirement. Please comment. > One concern that I have with allowing either permission scheme is that if > an MUA needs to recreate the spool file, how should it know what > permissions to use?
I guess we should grep the sources of a few MUAs (and MDAs) to see what they do. In the meantime, the new phrasing is still much better than the current text :) > - Mailboxes are generally mode 660 > - <tt><var>user</var>:mail</tt> unless the system > - administrator has chosen otherwise. A MUA may remove a > - mailbox (unless it has nonstandard permissions) in which > - case the MTA or another MUA must recreate it if needed. > - Mailboxes must be writable by group mail. > + Mailboxes are generally either owned by <var>user</var> and mode > + 600 or owned by <tt><var>user</var>:mail</tt> and mode 660 > + unless the system administrator has chosen otherwise I guess that the point of that run-on sentence is the understanding that packages should not go out of their way to prevent such sysadmin changes, so it would make sense to add a full stop after the two options and write a proper new sentence about that. > + <footnote> > + There are two traditional permission schemes for mail spools: > + mode 600 with all mail delivery done by processes running as > + the destination user, or mode 660 and owned by group mail with > + mail delivery done by a process running as a system user in > + group mail. Historically, Debian required mode 660 mail > + spools to enable the latter model, but that model has become > + increasingly uncommon and principal of least privilege Just a spelling fix - s/principal/the principle/ -- 2. That which causes joy or happiness. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]