On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 10:52:22AM -0700, Eduardo Chappa wrote: > *** Mark Crispin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote today: > :) Once again... > :) > :) Simultaneous access in the mbx format requires meaningful file locking. > :) > :) There is no such thing as meaningful file locking in Windows 98. > :) Windows 98 is not a real operating system. Nor are Windows 95, Windows > :) Me, Windows 3.1, MS-DOS, Mac OS 9 (and earlier), etc. > > Mark, > > Does this mean that the changes that you are accepting into C-client > will make Pine not work in Windows 9X when using mbx style folders?. I > believe you are trying to say that, but it is not completely clear. Your > answer is about locking, not about mbx style folders. I just want to be > sure that the answer to my question is yes. Can you confirm or deny this, > please?
I'll take a stab at this... mbx needs file locking if it has any hope of mailbox integrity if there is concurrent access - like email delivery or the mailbox being open in two processes. If you don't have real file locking, you can't use mbx. There is a nice long rant/documentation on locking in the UW-imap distro (so I presume it is in the Pine distro as well) in docs/locking.txt So to spell it out for you: Windows Me/98/95/3.11/3.1/3.0, MacOS 9, and MS-DOS cannot use mbx format without great risk of data corruption. It may be you *can* use mbx, but you shouldn't. I have a feeling that the Unix mailbox format will work better for you under these OSes. Using Windows 2000/XP/2003 will allow you to use both Windows *and* mbx in without these problems. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- __o Bradley Arlt Security Team Lead _ \<_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] University Of Calgary (_)/(_) Joyously Canadian Computer Science
