Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0

[t . sippel-dau]

The keyboard of Daniel Quinlan emitted at some point in time:

> Before reverting to /var/spool/mail, the practical question to ask
> distributions is:
> 
>   If we explicitly allow /var/mail to be a symbolic link to
>   /var/spool/mail (or whereever), will you *consider* changing
>   programs to reference /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail?
>   Upgraded systems would not need to have their mount point changed,
>   and old programs that reference /var/spool/mail would be okay for
>   one year.

Ten years.

> New systems would need to have a /var/spool/mail -> /var/mail symbolic
> link for about two years.

Ditto.

Software development may change fast, and many software developers will
change quickly in this case.  Documentation is much mmore difficult, and
what is actually used by users takes much longer again.

Since /var/mail and /var/spool/mail are "out there", it will not be
possible to use the "loosing" path for anything else for many years.

Thomas

*   Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ?
*
*   email: cmaae47 @ imperial.ac.uk

Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0

[t . sippel-dau]

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