On Tue, 14 May 2002, Edgar Lovecraft wrote:
> Point taken. I was looking at it from the standpoint that on v3 it worked and
> on v4 it did not (bug??). However, as it was pointed out, there was a change
> in v4 to support better data integrity (a very good thing), it would have been
> nice if somewhere in the docs it had said that it would break NFS spools.
Indeed, it would have been nice. But how was I to know? I don't use an
NFS spool, and even if I did, it would have been on Solaris or NetApp,
not Linux, so it wouldn't have broken, because Exim only plays this
directory fsync game on Linux because Linux is the only system that
requires it, as far as I currently know. Traditional Unix file systems
apparently sync directories after rename automatically, so you don't
need to force it. (And Linux has O_DIRECTORY, which other OS do not.)
It has been admitted that this is a bug in Linux NFS that will be fixed.
So I think, in this case, I can claim that it really wasn't my fault. I
can't test every possibly configuration on every available operating
system...
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
