[Pkg-Cyrus-imapd-Debian-devel] Re: Cyrus 2.2 packages in Debian Sarge

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Sven Mueller wrote:
> Another thing just crossed my mind when speaking of help needed: I 
> transplanted all the patches that made sense to me from the cyrus21 to 
> the cyrus22 package. This includes a patch which adds timeouts to 
> lib/lock_*.c and I'm not 100% sure they do the right thing. Is anyone on 
> this list capable of checking that? I know that the patch doesn't break 
> Cyrus, but I'm not sure it is effective.

For what is it worth: I would NOT run production without these patches, in
2.1.  Unless the code in 2.2 changed a LOT, you really want those patches.

They add a very large ammount of resilience to Cyrus in case of locking
problems.  What you must always keep in mind is that CMU is only now
starting to take a proactive "stop for nothing" instance re. Cyrus.
Previously, they would rather it stopped when facing problems than letting a
problem go unnoticed.

It took some doing, and also a LOT of patches showing them that a lot of
people would rather things were done that way. The current upstream crew has
seen the light and decided to take a "resilience in face of trouble (i.e.
attempt auto-repair) is a good thing" instance.

That said, the lock auto-timeout patches reduce the performance slightly.
But it won't cause a runaway process screwing up and locking the mailbox DB
to stop *everything* until you go there and kill it by force anymore...

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh