[Mailman-Developers] Change to acceptable_aliases

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "HM" == Harald Meland <Harald.Meland@usit.uio.no> writes:

    HM>  1) If the regexp does not contain an '@', first try matching
    HM> it against the localpart (i.e. the way things work now).

    HM>  2) If 1) was skipped *or* if it didn't produce a match, try
    HM> matching against entire recip address (i.e. try this even if
    HM> the regexp does not contain any '@' signs).

    HM>  3) Deprecate '@'-less regexps so that a future release will
    HM> only match against the entire address.  Warn the site admin if
    HM> any '@'-less regexps are found when upgrading to such a
    HM> (future) version.

    HM>  4) Possibly provide a small script that iterates through
    HM> all/specified lists, adding '@.*' to any lines in
    HM> acceptable_aliases not containing an '@'.  Such a change
    HM> _could_ break some (strange) regexps, and thus should not be
    HM> done automatically.

Except that I think `@'-less regexps still have useful semantics, so I
don't want to prohibit them.  I just want the matching to (eventually)
always be done against the entire recip address, not just the
localpart.

Because `@' isn't special in regular expressions, I can't think of any
reason someone would currently include it in acceptable_aliases unless
they incorrectly thought the entire address was being matched.  At
least, that's the misconception /I/ had!

So I think my approach is the right tradeoff in trying to guess what
the intent of the admin was, and shouldn't break anybody's current
acceptable_aliases settings.  It might start magically working for
those who had the same misconception that I did, but I think that's
okay (they expected it to work anyway).

-Barry