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From: bradley@cbnewsi.att.com (bradley.e.smith)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: What I would like to see changed in elm
Message-ID: <1990May23.193057.12569@cbnewsi.att.com>
Date: 23 May 90 19:30:57 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 45


I have voiced this opion before and gotten now where so here it is.
Below are the 2 changes I made to elm 2.2 (P16) to get the alias
feature to accept aliases such as:

mypals: mach1!user1, user2\@mach2, a!b!c!d!e

Currently you need to alias each user to an alias then make your
big alias.  This is much more typing then needed and in my opion
doesn't work the way you should.  So thats my complaint.  The patches
are not for patch(1) since they are soooo small (can we get this
as a configuration question?).  Also we have found people with
very long aliases (like >80 people in an alias), and when you use
the 'elm -c' option it dies do to the fact that the variable
'buffer' in main() (file: elm.c) is only SLEN in size.  We upp'd it
to 8*SLEN.

One last gripe.  if you use the elm -c option with a group alias, and
the names in the alias are aliases themselves, teh elm -c option doesn't
show you the final name, just the alias name.
=========changes to alias_lib.c in the function expand_group========
#ifdef FEATHERS
	/* took out '!' from get token because I didn't like it */
	/* bes - Wed May 23 10:51:39 EDT 1990 */
	while ((word = get_token(bufptr, ", ", depth)) != NULL) {
#else
	while ((word = get_token(bufptr, "!, ", depth)) != NULL) {
#endif
==========changes to newalias.c=======================
	/* this at line: 319  in function add_to_table; */
	if (group(address)) {
	  check_group(address, aliases);
	  if (error) return;	/* don't do work if we aren't to save it! */
#ifdef FEATHERS
	  fprintf(data, " %s\n", address);
#else
	  fprintf(data, "!%s\n", address);
#endif
	  additive = 2L;
	}

---
Bradley Smith
AT&T Bell Labs
bes@holin.att.com or bes@feathers.att.com