Change default MTA was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Nalin Dahyabhai]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 03:36:21PM +0100, =?ISO-8859-1?Q? Nils O. Sel=E5sdal?= wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 15:26, Nalin Dahyabhai wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 03:31:47PM -0800, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> > > In any case, your evidence is anecdotal, not proof.  It doesn't mirror 
> > > my own experience.  I've moved two companies to Maildir style delivery. 
> > > Both were previously using Slackware/Linux 2.0/sendmail/procmail. 
> > > This combination was not only corrupting mailboxes, but corrupting the 
> > > entire file system that the spools were on. (Damn Linux 2.0... Damn it 
> > > to hell)
> > 
> > A quick note: mailbox corruption is frequently caused by programs
> > disagreeing on how to properly lock a mailbox file.  This is problematic
> > because we currently have two methods for locking files, and they don't
> > interoperate.  More on that in fcntl(2), flock(2), lockf(3), and the
> > kernel's Documentation/locks.txt file.
> > 
> Is it _that_ hard changing applications to use lockf (or fcntl) ?
> To me it sounds like one could go through all mail applications in
> fedora and just make them use one of them (I'm guessing there is more to
> it that that...). Or is the problem more for 3.party apps/not shipped
> with fedora ?

It varies by application.  For some, it's a run-time configuration
option (and the application expects the user to make the right choice!
awesome!), for others it's a compile-time switch, and some you just have
to go in and patch.

This shouldn't happen very often in distributions these days, though.
You can't get all of the upstream maintainers who prefer to support only
one method to agree on a single method, so I expect that at some point
every distribution team sits down, looks at things, decides which way is
proper, and makes sure that the packages they ship at least agree.

Third-party applications and repositories could conceivably contain
problems, but I couldn't say for certain.

Cheers,

Nalin