Nigel tells us:
> The exim-dev@??? had an original brief of discussing changes to the
> development process. The initial phase of this has now completed, and
> so the list is changing function to be the primary forum for the
> discussion of exim development - for example this is the place to
> propose and discuss new features, bugs in exim's code or documentation
> etc.
... so, I hope this is now the appropriate place to post the following.
While trying to make robust start/stop scripts for Exim under Solaris
(high time to remove the sendmail packages!) I have become aware of some
deficiencies in Exim's pid_file handling. In particular, it does nothing
to invalidate the file contents when the daemon process terminates.
Although pid_file's have inevitable failure cases, it's possible to do
a great deal better than this. I suggest
(a) Exim should try to unlink the file when the daemon exits: it's
not always the case that it can't do this after it has lost root
privilege;
(b) In case it can't, it should keep the file open, and on exit it
should truncate it to size zero if it can't unlink it.
--
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Email: cet1@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QH,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
