Reconstruct behaviour on IO error

[Patrick Goetz]

On 10/04/2010 02:07 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> Keep going and remove entires for messages with
> IO errors reading their file, or bail and make the administrator fix the
> underlying permissions first?  I can see arguments for both - though remember
> that once you've removed the index record you can never go back under
> strict UID existence semantics, so if the admin fixes the files later then
> reconstruct will actually give them new UIDs.
>



Definitely bail.  It's too easy to miss things like this when lots of 
characters are being piped to the screen, resulting in mail being 
silently "lost".  I recently had a user complain about missing sent 
messages from 2004.  He was working on a project that went on hold for a 
very long time, but now needed to be revisited.  I checked the backups 
and his 2004 sent mail has been gone for at least 5 years (as far back 
as my backups went).  This didn't prevent him from throwing a fit about 
"unreliable" systems.