On Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 10:30:52AM +0000, Crystal Kolipe wrote:
This could plausibly break things for anyone who has written one or more old maildir directories to a read-only medium, and to save space has removed the empty 'new' and 'tmp' directories.On the other hand, implementing this change would discourange users from doing the same thing going forward, so overall I think it's the correct approach. Would it make sense to drop the check for 'new' and 'tmp' IFF 'cur' can only be opened read-only? Admittedly, anybody who removes 'tmp' and 'new' has already created a non-standard directory structure that other programs would not be guaranteed to recognise. But that doesn't mean that somebody out there hasn't done it. Maybe have the 'missing new and tmp, but on a read-only medium' case throw a warning, and see if anybody ever mentions seeing the warning. If not, remove the workaround after a couple of years.
Thanks Crystal. I appreciate your thinking through possible problems!However, I don't think that potential case is a big enough issue to add the extra code, or delay fixing by a couple years (with a warning). :-)
I'll add an entry to the UPDATING file to let people know about the change, but after hearing others got confused by the same weird behavior I'd rather just fix it now.
-- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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