Steffen Daode Nurpmeso <sdao...@googlemail.com> added the comment: On Thu, 5 May 2011 03:52:29 +0200, R. David Murray wrote: > [..] the shell [..] I believe it just looks at the mtime/atime.
/* check_mail () is useful for more than just checking mail. Since it has the paranoids dream ability of telling you when someone has read your mail, it can just as easily be used to tell you when someones .profile file has been read, thus letting one know when someone else has logged in. Pretty good, huh? */ /* If the user has just run a program which manipulates the mail file, then don't bother explaining that the mail file has been manipulated. Since some systems don't change the access time to be equal to the modification time when the mail in the file is manipulated, check the size also. If the file has not grown, continue. */ /* If the mod time is later than the access time and the file has grown, note the fact that this is *new* mail. */ > Not all system mail spools are mode 1777. Mutt needs to be > setgid mail on systems that aren't, if I understand correctly. > Making a python program setgid mail is a bit more of security > issue than making a well-tested C program setgid, since it is > easier to break out of the box in a python program. Ok, maybe set-group-ID on /var/mail isn't even necessary; 0 drwxrwxx-x 3 root mail 102 5 May 11:30 mail is enough as long as $ groups $USER states you are member of group mail. On my system mailbox.py doesn't have any problems with modifying the mail directory. If this is not true on your box go and stress your admin, he's not worth his money - is he? I.e., whereas it is possible to rewrite mailbox.py to handle issue #7359 i would not do so because it is unnecessary on correctly setup boxes. Maybe mailbox.py has used so much copy-and-paste from mutt(1)'s mbox.c because that code works well for many years. And Jason seems to work as root all of the time. > mailbox is an mbox manipulation program, not a mail delivery > agent. If you are using it to write a mail delivery agent, > I think perhaps the mtime setting code belongs in your > application, not the mailbox module. I really don't understand your point now. Of course the standart is soft like butter in that it seems to assume that the spool mailbox is then locally processed and truncated to zero length, so that "mailbox has grown==new mail arrived", whereas it is also possible to use that spool file as a real local mailbox, including resorting, partial deletion etc.. This issue is about fixing mailbox.py to adhere MMDF and MBOX standarts, which is what the patch implements. This patch works for me locally in that mutt(1) will mention that new mail has arrived in the boxes. The patch uses a safe approach by dating back the access time instead of pointing modification time into the future, which however will make the patch fail on Pear OS X if the mailbox is on HFS, case sensitive, because that is buggy and *always* updates atime; maybe this is because Apple only provides a shallow wrapper around UFS to integrate that in the Microkernel/IOKit structure, just in case HFS, case sensitive is really UFS, but i'm guessing in all directions here. I would not adjust the patch to fix this, but the problem exists and it has been noted in this issue. -- Steffen sdao...@gmail.com ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue11935> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com