On Sun, 11 Oct 1998, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> > --[ aliasfile ]--
> > *: :fail: Nothing here, move along
> > --[ aliasfile ]--
> >
> > and everything is fluffy again, is this a known change or has
> > something odd happened?
>
> What you had before never should have worked, but it appears that some
> sloppiness was allowed in alias files. Guess it no longer is.
It isn't documented (but I have a note to say that it should be) that
white space is acceptable as a terminator for keys in lsearched files as
an alternative to colon. This is particularly useful for files other
than alias files, e.g. files containing lists of local domains or
blocked addresses, or whatever.
However, there was a change in Exim 2.03 to allow spaces *before* the
optional colon, e.g.
postmaster : joe, bill, bob
I do not seem to have recorded why this change was made: the only note
in the ChangeLog is
46. Keep only a single space character at the start of a continuation
line when looking up lsearch data.
However, the note for updating the manual explicitly says that these
pre-colon spaces are permitted, so the change was obviously deliberate.
Perhaps it was for compatibility with something else. Apologies for my
sloppy record keeping.
I obviously overlooked the fact that allowing spaces means that you
*must* put in the colon if the data part of the record starts with a
colon. I will stress this point when the manual gets revised.
Thanks for the report.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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