[4087] in testers
Re: This time a bigger bug.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Fri May 21 14:43:18 1999
To: Omri Schwarz <ocschwar@MIT.EDU>
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU
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From: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Date: 21 May 1999 14:43:07 -0400
In-Reply-To: Omri Schwarz's message of "Fri, 21 May 1999 12:25:38 -0400"
Message-Id: <w6m3e0q8ds4.fsf@well.mit.edu>
<daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> (Omri Schwarz) writes:
> Same problem as before ( I logged
> in to a beta machine and forgot rcvstore moved),
> except this time the email is kaput.
The mail should be in either +MyIncTmp or +MyIncErrors, I hope.
It's a little bit dangerous; but my testing so far has shown the
8.3 machines to do the right thing. Exmh inc's your mail into
+MyIncTmp. It then takes each file in MyIncTmp, and runs
slocal on the file. If slocal fails (either fails to run, or
exits with an error), then exmh will refile your message into
+MyIncErrors.
Here's the fun part. On 8.3 machines, slocal has moved from
/usr/athena/etc to /usr/athena/libexec. Yesterday exmh was
trying to run it from the wrong place, failing, and refiling into
+MyIncErrors. I changed exmh to run slocal from the right place.
But.
8.3 slocal does the right thing if there are errors in your
.maildelivery file. It exits with an error status, exmh notices,
and refiles your mail into +MyIncErrors.
8.2 slocal does the _wrong_ thing if there are errors in your
.maildelivery file. It silently exits (no error status). Exmh
thinks everything is okay, thinks your mail has been copied to
somewhere permanent, and exmh deletes the copy in +MyIncTmp.
I haven't seen 8.3 machines behave in a way that would cause
users to accidentally lose mail. At worst, it gets refiled
somewhere non-obvious. But, I myself lost mail this morning when
I had made a half-tested tweak to my ~/.maildelivery file, and
then used an 8.2 machine. I lost, because I wasn't as careful
about testing this time as I had been the first time I set this up.
If you're sure that using an 8.3 machine causes your mail to
silently go away, that would be significant. Testing I've done
on Irix and Solaris just shows refiling into +MyIncErrors.
-jake
