Symlinks or no Symlinks (was: Re: W32/Bagle-Zip)

[John Rudd]

Julian Field wrote:
>
> You almost certainly have your "Incoming Work Directory" set wrong. The
> path set in there must be the absolute path to the directory, not a path
> that follows any links. Yours should be set to
> /home/spool/MailScanner/incoming
> and I expect you have something like
> /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming.
>

I see you say that every so often, and I wonder what the deal is on this
one.

For one, I use symlinks to my MailScanner work area because I have to
(due to some local configuration issues), and yet I have no problems
with doing so.  I don't see any leaks, errors, etc.  MailScanner seems
to actually function fine with that situation.


So, why must it be the absolute path?  What is it that you think will
break/happen if it's not the absolute path?  And, since it's perl, and
perl can break open symlinks to see where they go, why not have some
routine find the real path if it's that important, allowing the runtime
environment to be absolute while also allowing the system administration
model to be flexible?


(actually, since it's a directory, you don't even need to use that
symlink property, you can just run an external script that chdir's to
that directory, spits out where it really is, and then have mailscanner
use that output as its incoming directory location)


(and, are there likely to be problems that I'm just not seeing in my
results? invisible gotchas and such?  it really seems like "it works
even though Julian says it wont", which DOES make me wonder about future
support for it, but for now it works)