The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Mail Administrator, Otto J. Makela" <address@concealed>]

As I'm not terribly familiar with Postfix (or Sympa), it took me a while to
figure out what was wrong with the instructions given on the page:
        http://www.sympa.org/manual/mail-aliases#alias_manager

It doesn't tell you two rather important things:

1) By default, the value in Constants.pm for SENDMAIL_ALIASES (which specifies
the alias file) is /etc/mail/sympa_aliases which you can override in
sympa.conf with sendmail_aliases, but by default none is set and the setup
wizard doesn't ask about it. So the instructions tell you to edit into the
file a value different from what Sympa uses by default.

2) alias_manager.pl indeed does run newaliases, but the Postfix newaliases
does NOT rebuild the databases given in its configuration setting alias_maps,
but only the ones given in alias_database. So, again, the value suggested in
the documentation is not what Postfix by default uses.

One way to fix these is to add the following line to /etc/sympa.conf:
sendmail_aliases        /home/sympa/etc/sympa_aliases
and the following line to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases,hash:/home/sympa/etc/sympa_aliases

Who could correct this somewhat misleading documentation?

--
address@concealed (Mail Administrator, Otto J. Makela)