At 01:43 PM 5/1/00 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
The one questionable aspect of the new LockFile.py is that it uses the mtime of the file as the lock's lifetime. This works great for avoiding race conditions but means that Mailman is setting mtime's of the files to some time in the future. Is anybody aware of OSes where this will be a problem? Linux and Solaris both seem to stay happy.
The things I can think of:
This makes mailman very sensitive to time synchonization problems in environments with NFS mounted directories (possibly more a problem with mailman than many others since it's so easy to just run it out of ~mailman as a regular user).
Setting mtime in the future will probably piss off fsck; which in environments with multiple systadmins, or the mailman person isn't a sysadmin, could be horribly confusing.
Both can probably be addressed by adding warnings to the readme and/or install files.