Hi all,
I was recently trying to figure out once and for all why some aliases to
an include file appeared to have randomly stopped working since, I
*think*, OpenBSD 7.7 (I apologize, I didn't exactly track when did the
breakage occur, but the affected mbox files report January 8 2025 as
the last modification date, so presumably the last successful write),
and went down a rabbit hole of source code and documentation. However, I
think that the manpages are perhaps a bit unclear on the behaviour of
aliases, namely 2 things:
- it *seems* to me that newaliases(8) *always* generates a map with
makemap(8), not only "if using database (db) files" as described in
newaliases(8), however the default /etc/mail/aliases instructs users to
*always* run newaliases(8) after changes are made.
- it also *seems* to me that having the "include" in ":include:"
underlined in aliases(5) is misleading, since it is a reserved keyword
and not something to replace, as all other underlined things in
aliases(5) are, so maybe the underline should be removed there since
that was also a source of great confusion to me as I tried to debug
this problem.
I am still not entirely sure if I have properly debugged this problem, I
am simply trying to make an automatically generated file in order to
forward local mail from root@ to all users of a UNIX group which seems
to require manually expanding its members and writing it to a file,
unless I am missing something obvious. However, I wanted to point these
potential documentation ambiguities out first in case others stumble
across this themselves.
Thanks in advance for any and all clarifications on these matters~
