The keyboard of Kragen Sitaker emitted at some point in time: > > On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > If we must back out /var/mail (for no good technical reason that I can > > determine), then at the very least I think we should state that there > > that for all compliant distributions, /var/mail *MUST* be a valid way of > > reaching the spool directory (i.e., there should be a symlink there, or > > where the spool directory actually lives) > > If you include this change, will using ~/Mailbox violate the FHS? Does > it already? Should it? Should we require symlinks from > /var/mail/$USER to ~$USER/Mailbox?
Hmm, and a mandatory symlink form $LOGNAME/Mailbox to /var/mail/$LOGNAME, and we will have established FHS compliant systems as those "where email won't work any more". N.B. your phrasing was not POSIX compliant, tut, tut, tut. A good example how technically simple and conceptually irrelevant changes (from USER to LOGNAME) are still extremely dificult to achieve in practice. > Switching a single one-user system to ~/Mailbox is easy, btw. > Switching a single multi-user system to ~/Mailbox is likely to cause a > certain amount of pain. Pain of no real benefit to the end user, as long as "it works". > Distributing applications to millions of > people, some of whom use one convention, and some of whom use another, > is surely asking for trouble. Yes, it is. arguing about it will make mpore pain. Thomas * Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ? * * email: cmaae47 @ imperial.ac.uk