Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!van-bc!skl
From: skl@van-bc.UUCP (Samuel Lam)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: System aliases
Summary: Isn't the current behaviour meaningless then?
Keywords: ELM, aliases.
Message-ID: <203@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jul 89 08:14:31 GMT
References: <509@wubios.wustl.edu> <177@van-bc.UUCP> <1023@isaak.UUCP>
Organization: Balliffe International, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 44

In article <1023@isaak.UUCP>, woerz@isaak.UUCP (Dieter Woerz) wrote:
>In article <177@van-bc.UUCP> I wrote:
>>In article <509@wubios.wustl.edu>, phil@wubios.UUCP (J. Philip Miller) wrote:
>>>[about system aliases being replaced by the senders's personal
>>> aliases with the same name]
>
>>Listing each local user's mailbox's name in the group's membership
>>list should do the job.
>
>There is still a problem. Asume you have the following system alias
>file:
>    allusers =  All users of this host  =   a, b, c, d, e, f
>and the sender of the message has the following in his personal
>aliases file:
>    c = ... =   c@x.y.z
>Then the c@x.y.z get the message that should have reached c on the
>local machine.

If that's the case, then shouldn't the current behaviour of this be
consider broken?  My argument here is that when the system administrator
makes up the system aliases file, there would be no way for him to
predict how the system aliases would later expand IF each user's private
aliases file is also taken into consideration during the later expansion.
If there is no way to predict how a system alias is going to expand, then
what good is it to have system aliases (that's unpredictable).  (Under
what circumstances would the current behaviour be actually considered
useful?)

On the other hand, if system aliases expansions only use aliases in the
system aliases file, then it would indeed provide the "pre-defined names"
facility which (I think) it was originally intended for.

Thus, I propose:

1) When expanding a user alias, make use of other aliases from the same
   user and the system aliases, as necessary.

2) When expanding a system alias, only make use of the other system
   aliases.

Does this approach make sense?

-- 
Samuel Lam     {alberta,watmath,uw-beaver,cs.ubc.ca}!ubc-cs!van-bc!skl