From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Oct 31 17:29:07 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA22104 for chat-outgoing; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 17:29:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id RAA22067; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 17:28:59 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA26864; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 18:22:55 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199611010122.SAA26864@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: /var/mail (was: re: Help, permission problems...) To: chat@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 18:22:55 +1700 (MST) Cc: MRC@Panda.COM, current@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Marc G. Fournier" at Oct 31, 96 07:22:20 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Wait, this is stupid...why can't the code have 'fallback' options... > if .lock fails, try lockin with fcntl(), if fcntl() fails, try with flock(), > if flock() fails, *then* give an error message and abort... Because silently relying on flock() to do what the man page says it does is something that has bit him in the past, he says. I think it's too much emphasis on the negative. I think that if he gets error reports on FreeBSD, he should say "sorry, report it to them: their flock is supposed to work". Then if there are bugs, they get fixed instead of warning the user and prompting a "what does this mean?" support mail message and a loss of confidence in FreeBSD doing the right thing by default. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.