Re: [Nmh-workers] problems with slocal

[Peter Maydell]

address@hidden wrote:
>Alternatively, the package is LGPL, so why not include it with nmh? It's not
>obvious where people should acquire liblockfile, as there is no official site
>for it, and distro's often add weird deps. Luckily debian's 1.08-3 works.

The trouble is that part of the point of liblockfile is "do whatever this
distro/OS/etc requires for locking the mailspool". As far as I know it's
not possible to autodetect this, and shipping a library which did the
wrong kind of locking would be even worse.

Sadly very few OSes or distros actually document what the locking strategy
for the mailspool is, let alone providing system libraries which do it right
for you.

It might be interesting to see what approach other more popular MUAs (eg
mutt?) take to this configuration problem; although I think nmh is
technically doing the right thing in punting the problem to the person
building the program it does cause a lot of user confusion.

-- PMM