upgrade problem [was: simplicity vs safety with complexity]

[Greg McCann]

On 1/25/2005 at 11:05 PM David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:

>I'm sorry to hear you encountered major problems.  'Tisn't supposed to
>happen.  Can you say anything about what _did_ go wrong?  As our goal is
>to make bogofilter simple and reliable (especially during upgrades),
>your information would be helpful. 

Thank you, David.  I believe I mentioned this in more detail in an earlier message, but received a reply from someone that did not seem to me to be relevant to the actual problem I stated.  I was more busy than usual at the time, so I found it easiest to revert to the earlier version rather than spend more time on followup.

I am using bogofilter with procmail.  My users have customized ~/.procmailrc files.  There are several reasons for this, unique to each user.  For example, when one user goes on vacation, she wants all of her non-spam automatically forwarded to her Yahoo account.  Other users have customized lists of senders in their .procmailrc who automatically bypass bogofilter (or are even automatically scored as non-spam), etc..  Because of the individual, customized ~/.procmailrc configurations, procmail, and therefore bogofilter as run from procmail, gets run under the UIDs of the individual users.

I don't think this should be an uncommon situation, but bogofilter does not seem to accommodate this configuration by default.  To make this work with earlier versions, I simply set wordlist.db to chmod 666, which allowed bogofilter, as run under any UID, to read from or write to wordlist.db.  However with the latest version and its multiplicity of db__ and .log files, each new db__ or .log file receives the UID of the current user as it is created.  So when the next user receives an email, and their instance of bogofilter attempts to access the db__ and .log files that are owned by another user, chaos ensues.

So now I am back to bogofilter 0.91.1.  It works pretty well except for the occasional TEMPFAIL procmail error which I was trying to correct by upgrading to 0.93.4.

I am sure there must be good reasons for the new way of doing things, but I personally found it much easier to have a single wordlist.db file to keep watch over, instead of the current situation where database files (and disk space) multiply beyond my control.

Best regards,


Greg McCann