Visiting read-only folders
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
VM |
Fix Committed
|
Medium
|
Uday Reddy |
Bug Description
Julian Bradfield reports (viewmail-info, 2012-02-14):
VM is behaving badly with read-only folders.
If I visit a folder read-only, I don't expect it to be changed and
written back to disk. However, this happens:
(a) If I visit a folder created by my MTA, VM says "upgrading
attributes", and then the folder is modified, and VM writes it
back to disk when I quit. This of course causes corruption if the
MTA is writing new mail at the same time, since they use different
locking mechanisms.
(b) If I visit a virtual read-only folder, and then I change the
attributes of a message (by, say, filing it), the underlying
folder has its attributes changed and gets written when I quit the
virtual folder. I don't think this is right either.
My understanding of a read-only folder is that nothing I do to it
should cause any modification of the disk file.
Related branches
Changed in vm: | |
milestone: | 8.2.2a → 8.2.1a |
Changed in vm: | |
milestone: | 8.2.1a → 8.2.90a |
(viewmail-info, 2012-02-14):
I don't think that that kind of semantics has ever been promised for read-only' . Actually, I don't find it documented in the manual
`vm-folder-
at all, which means to me that no promises were ever made.
...
If you do not want a folder changed, your best bet is to use
`vm-quit-no-change' when you are done.
We can discuss assigning a strong semantics to read-only, but I suspect that
it may be difficult to implement. "Upgrading attributes", for example,
needs to be done when an old folder is read because the new code base will
only work with the upgraded version of data. We can perhaps refrain from
writing the folder back to the disk at the end if the read-only flag is set.