locking problems with 2.1.9

[Lawrence Greenfield]

   Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 14:02:52 -0200
   From: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org>

   On Wed, 06 Nov 2002, John Wade wrote:
   > I assume you are using flat seen files.  If so, I ran into this
   > problem on 2.0.16 and came up with a workaround which others
   > ported to 2.1.3.  This was based on flock, but you might be able
   > to use the same basic technique.  see
   > http://servercc.oakton.edu/~jwade/cyrus/

   Yeah, Debian has that patch applied (and forward ported to 2.1.9,
   both fcntl and flock), files lib/lock*...  It works wonderfully.  I
   have never received any reports of seen file lock troubles in the
   Debian packages.

   I believe it is also in the CMU Bugzilla.

I haven't seen any evidence of this happening on non-Linux platforms,
nor have I heard that there is ever a time when the file gets replaced
even though it is locked.

If it is merely a process that already has a lock blocks trying to get
the same lock, then it is a kernel problem.

Could we have more detail on any other failures?

Larry