[pkg-fetchmail-maint] Bug#531589: fetchmail: --idle does not react well to an IP address change

[Frédéric Brière]

Package: fetchmail
Version: 6.3.9~rc2-4+b1
Severity: normal

I'm currently running fetchmail --idle on a somewhat flaky PPPoE link,
where my IP address tends to change quite often.

On every IP address change, the following happens:

- /etc/init.d/fetchmail awaken is run by the PPP/resolvconf script

- Fetchmail ignores the USR1 signal

- Upon expiration of the 28-minute IDLE timeout, when it is time to
  issue a DONE, fetchmail reports a timeout "waiting for server", and
  goes to sleep for <interval>.

- On the next cycle, it finally re-establishes a connection to the IMAP
  server.  (I guess I shouldn't have picked 3600 as the poll interval.)


It seems to me that fetchmail should react to a USR1 in IDLE just like
it does when polling.  (I realize that IDLE is run *within* the polling
loop, but it's conceptually presented as an *alternative* to polling, so
it should behave the same.)


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.29-2-686-sco (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages fetchmail depends on:
ii  adduser                  3.110           add and remove users and groups
ii  debianutils              3.1.3           Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                    2.9-13          GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcomerr2               1.41.6-1        common error description library
ii  libgssapi-krb5-2         1.7dfsg~beta3-1 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - k
ii  libk5crypto3             1.7dfsg~beta3-1 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - C
ii  libkrb5-3                1.7dfsg~beta3-1 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries
ii  libssl0.9.8              0.9.8g-16       SSL shared libraries
ii  lsb-base                 3.2-22          Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip

Versions of packages fetchmail recommends:
ii  ca-certificates               20081127   Common CA certificates

Versions of packages fetchmail suggests:
pn  fetchmailconf                 <none>     (no description available)
ii  postfix [mail-transport-agent 2.5.5-1.1  High-performance mail transport ag
ii  resolvconf                    1.43       name server information handler

-- no debconf information