Re: Draft manuals (qmail)
Raul Miller writes (Re: Draft manuals (qmail)): ... Perhaps it's reasonable to specify that every mail aware program supports the MAIL environmental variable. As qmail's default behavior is to deliver mail to ~user/Mailbox in standard unix mailbox format, this should suffice. But does it use the same locking strategy as our other mailers ? Additional recommendations or specifications which open the door to maildir compatability (e.g. that movemail be used to retrieve locally stored mail -- allowing, at worst, the administrator to set policy by replacing movemail) might also be reasonable. This can't be done sensibly for mailers like mailx, Elm and Pine which manipulate and leave messages in the inbox, and incurs extra delay with (eg) mh. Ian.
Re: Draft manuals
Raul Miller writes (Re: Draft manuals): Some thought about qmail should occur [in the section on mail processing]. qmail doesn't use a mail spool directory for security reasons, mail boxes are in the user's home directory by default. And, of course, there's the maildir format for people wanting a very robust system. I've seen mention on debian-devel of making movemail aware of maildir. I suspect that this is the right thing to do. qmail's author has taken a deliberate choice to be incompatible with things, and this means that we can either: * mandate that everything support what qmail does * live with not everything working when you use qmail. What precisely do you think I should put in the policy manual on this subject ? I'm loath to mandate that every program support qmail's maildir format. Perhaps the qmail package should come with a local delivery agent that can do delivery into /var/spool/mail ? It only has to be setgid mail, not setuid root. That requirement would be the effect of the policy requirements as they're written atm. Ian.
Draft manuals
I have finished draft versions of the programmers' and policy manuals. The PostScript conversion isn't working yet, but they are available for your perusal in HTML or plain text (with or without overstrikes). HTML via the Web: http://chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk/~ian/programmer.html/ http://chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk/~ian/policy.html/ Note the trailing / on each URL. ASCII text versions, SGML source and the DTD via anon-ftp: chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk:/users/ian/dpkg-doc/ Your comments would be appreciated; feel free to send patches to the .sgml files if you think it appropriate (but don't send lots of unrelated patches together). PACKAGE MAINTAINERS TAKE NO ACTION. This is NOT an official announcement of the change to the standards. If you want to see what's coming and argue about it (again) please do so though :-). The DTD was once linuxdoc but is no longer. I've ripped out everything that my converters don't support, and added new tags to do the things that I needed. I've called it dpkgdoc. The converters are based on sp (the SGML parser package containing nsgmls) and sgmlspm (the Perl modules for parsing sgmls output) with another Perl glue script for cross-referencing. Ian.
