On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 17:39:48 +0200 Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de> wrote:
Tim Southerwood <ts@doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:
It's not dovecot's fault, which is fair, and this bug should be dropped as not a bug.
It's not really a bug with dovecot, but if F_SETLKW fails, dovecot should fall back to something involving F_SETLK.
I prefer number 2) as a user as it's clear to me that there is some brokenness on NFS servers in the world and it would be to the greater good if dovecot were more forgiving.
Number 2 is a bit disputable, because the OS is supposed to behave, and it is more sensible to fix the cause rather than implement workarounds in 1000+1 applications.
Well, I would agree with you in an ideal world. However, there may be sites where the linux admin has no control over the Solaris (or other broken) servers holding users' mail - so it would be more beneficial that the application have a failover mode (or at least some compile time configuration). Dovecot uses this locking in two places that matter so it's not IMHO a terrible disaster to add a small workaround.
Having said that, I must be respectful; it's not my code, and I'm grateful that it exists at all. It's a big improvement over WU-IMAP. Of course the main developers must decide what to do. But I've expressed my opinion which I feel has some merit.
Best wishes
Tim
Tim J Southerwood Senior Programmer CSG, Dept of Computing, Imperial College, London