After the fix for bug 74622, uw-imap complains that /var/spool/mail doesn't have 1777 perms. Whether or not it's correct, the gentoo folks have decided that 0775 are the right perms for that directory. uw-imap falls back to using flock, but that's not compatible with procmail's and mutt's primary use of dotlocking. uw-imap should be configured to use its mlock program by default (see http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#7.10), but mlock is placed in /usr/bin, where imap doesn't look by default, and without the necessary setgid mail. This should be fixed by making uw-imap look for /usr/bin/mlock (the FAQ says how), and then making that setgid mail. Ideally, all programs which use a setgid mail dot-locking program should use the same one, if possible. Pine and uw-imap deliver one, mutt delivers another. But that's beyond the scope of this bug.
Try comment #8 from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=103479 Thats the workaround we are going to adopt. Cheers, Ferdy
Why that workaround? As a system distributor, you get to patch things so they work properly out of the box, without config files, which should generally only be used for overriding system-default (not program-default) behavior. In addition, the locking mechanism used by all the mail programs gentoo supports needs to be coordinated, or the user may very well end up with coordinated mailboxes. My system has postfix, pine, uw-imap, procmail, and mutt, which use fcntl, flock, flock, dotlock, and fcntl/dotlock, as best I can tell. It's not a heavily used system, so I've gotten lucky so far, but it's a recipe for disaster on a heavier system. Gentoo's mail programs all need to be configured to use the same locking mechanism(s), so that we don't end up with corrupt mailboxes. Just eliminating warnings (even as bogus as they are) doesn't solve anything except slightly larger logs ....
Well, if you can provide _reliable_ patches for all relevant packages to use single filelocking mechanism, I see no problem with this.
Since mailbase doesn't enforce perms anymore, this is something I don't think we'll fix. (unless said patches are sent). Cheers, Ferdy
