Re: Symbolic Links for mailboxes in Gnus

[Erik Selberg <speed@cs.washington.edu>]

Steven L Baur writes:

> 2)  If you are not using procmail, the the following code loses when
> the mailbox is a symbolic link (from nnmail-get-new-mail):
>       ;; The we go through all the existing spool files and split the
>       ;; mail from each.
>       (while spools
> 	(setq spool (pop spools))
> 	;; We read each spool file if either the spool is a POP-mail
> 	;; spool, or the file exists.  We can't check for the
> 	;; existance of POPped mail.
> 	(when (or (string-match "^po:" spool)
> 		  (and (file-exists-p spool)
>>>>> (> (nth 7 (file-attributes spool)) 0)))

> The idiom (nth 7 (file-attributes ...)) returns the file size, but
> with a symbolic link, it will return the length in characters of the
> filename the link is pointing to (always > 0).

> In order to make this code work with symbolic links it must be changed to:
> 		       (> (nth 7 (file-attributes (file-truename spool))) 0)))

> Now the code will work with symbolic links, which also seem to not
> bother movemail.

yup... just tried it, and things are working well without the patch I
previously posted.

> Do we really want Gnus to encourage this unsafe practice?

I misunderstand how this can be termed "unsafe." Could you elaborate?
Here at UW, it's nearly a necessity because of our completely outdated
spool system.

-Erik