Wanting a pre-db4 bogofilter

[Matthias Andree]

Tom Allison <tallison at tacocat.net> writes:

> Most people use bogofilter through a local mail delivery agent (MDA) 
> similar to procmail and maildrop.  These have a built in flock option to 
> prevent each user from doing concurrent processing which would put the 
> bogofilter wordlist at risk of corruption.

Database corruption is caused by crashes (blackouts), not by locking issues.

> So, if you are using
> procmail with file locking do you really need a transactional berkeley 
> database behind bogofilter?

Yes, we do.

> transactional requirements already provided?"  I don't know anything 
> about sql-lite so I probably need to pull my foot out of my mouth on 
> this one but as an example, postgresql is ACID compliant thereby 
> providing all the transactional database protection that anyone could 
> ever ask for.  And it does a great job sharing data between different 
> hardware types, including Windows.

SQLite3 is a "smaller" SQL-based interface, to test this issue; a
PostgreSQL backend is certainly conceivable. Currently, SQLite is much
slower (about an order of magnitude) than BerkeleyDB or QDBM, and it
does not yet incur context switch and IPC overhead as PostgreSQL would.

> Granted, postgresql is a bit larger than berkeley, but if you are going 
> to be using something in an environment that requires transactional 
> locking (implying shared files and other issues that cannot be addressed 
> by procmail flock) then you probably can afford the resource investment 
> of a database client/server like postgresql.  (mysql too, but I'm 
> unfamiliar with it).

PostgreSQL brings communication overhead on top of that.

> I've also periodically ran into threads on daemonizing bogofilter. 
> Wouldn't this fit in better with the ideas of shared wordlists, 
> transactional databases, and really high performance spam filtering
> systems?

And require access control, multithreaded server and all that.

> bogofilter compiled to non-transactional berkeley database environment 
> for those of us who have light servers, non-shared files, or are 
> comfortable with flocking via maildrop/procmail.  This is essentially 
> the requested "pre-db4" software version.

Run-time switching is in CVS, with only minor polishing needed. It has
some rough spots but works.

> I like zero-admin features.

Yup.

-- 
Matthias Andree
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