Re: maildir in Gnus vs. clock corrections and PID recycling

[Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@uni-dortmund.de>]

Paul Jarc schrieb am Sonntag, den 19. Januar 2003:

> > The supposedly later http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html refines the
> > documentation, and demands that the middle part does not recur within
> > one second, which is still insufficient given that a computer clock
> > might be stepped back,
> 
> Stepping a clock backwards produces so many problems that it is better
> to ignore those problems, run the clock monotonically, and find a
> different way to deal with any problems that stepping backwards was
> supposed to solve.

This would mean rebooting systems when the clocks are fast and cannot be
just slowed reasonably -- this cannot be expected, so applications must
be prepared to clocks being stepped backwards. It'd be fine with me if
the program would just complain, the ultime goal is avoiding EVER
overwriting a file.

> That sounds like a good idea.  As long as all maildir writers do that,
> readers (programs that move messages from new/ to cur/) won't have to
> be changed.  nnmaildir does deliver new messages to tmp/ sometimes, so
> I'll change that.  But the problem isn't likely to affect nnmaildir
> anyway, since Emacs is long-lived and nnmaildir is not likely to
> deliver new messages within 1 second of Emacs starting or exiting.

Agreed.

-- 
Matthias Andree