Scott Silva wrote:
on 4-2-2008 4:41 AM Brent L. Bates spake the following:
Sendmail used to automatically compare creation dates of the textand database aliases files and when the text one was newer than the database one, sendmail would automatically update the database file at a convenient time. This made a lot of sense. However, the powers that be decided to break this great feature and removed it. I copied it back into to source we use.
Many newer distros add that functionality to the init scripts. I seem to recall that option had some bad side effects, and that is why sendmail removed it. I wish I could remember what the problem was.
Just guessing, it probably relates to the gazillion ways unix-like systems have of locking files that tend not to work and the fact that concurrent sendmail instances are a lot more likely to conflict than a user typing 'newaliases'.