[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Craig_Everhart@transarc.com]

Excerpts from mail: 30-Nov-01 Re: [OpenAFS] mail spool on.. Jason
Edgecombe@carolina (1265*)

>   I'm using pine as an example. when modifying the mail spool, pine
> would check for new mail first. In reality, new mail had come in, but
> pine only saw the AFS cached copy (note: this is Transarc AFS). pine
> would then alter the mail spool file and overwrite the file and any new
> mail contained therein.

AFS is pretty clunky for concurrent access to a file, which is what I
think you're talking about.  The AFS trick is that if you ever fail to
get a lock on a file, you have to close the file and re-open it to get
the semantics correct.

Probably pine doesn't do this.  It's not generally necessary on a single
machine, but it's one of the screw cases with concurrent multi-client
access in AFS.

Complications like this are one of the reasons that systems I've used
have embedded separate messages in separate files.

		Craig