Bug#432229: exim4-config: colon / semicolon confusion for one single IPv6 relay address

[Marc Haber]

tags #432229 confirmed pending
thanks

On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 03:20:34PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 06:10:39PM +0200, Frederic Daniel Luc LEHOBEY wrote:
> > As the setting of having one single IPv6 address to relay might be
> > quite uncommon, the main purpose of this bug report is to properly
> > report and document this weird behaviour. (Maybe add a sentence to the
> > debconf template?)
> 
> I think that this issue deserves fixing. I need to ponder a while
> whether the fix is possible without breaking things, but probably
> documentation in README and/or NEWS may be the only thing possible.
> I'd rather not clutter up the debconf templates with that corner-case
> information, but would prefer things to Just Work[tm]. Not sure
> whether this may be possible.

Unfortunately, the fix would mean to automatically distinguish an IPv6
address from a colon-separated list of strangely coded IP addresses.
In the example, 2002:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001/128 can be
taken as 0.0.7.210:0.0.0.0:0.0.0.1/128 (the latter of that being
semantically invalid).

Hence, it looks like the only thing I can do is document this, and I
have chosen to do so in the man page for update-exim4.conf which has a
paragraph about list formatting anyway. New wording:


-----
All lists given in configuration variables are semicolon-separated. In
the past, they used to be colon separated. This was changed to
semicolon separation to make specification of IPv6 addresses easier.
Backwards compatibility is preserved, so that old configurations using
colons as separators do still work. Colons are deprecated and might
stop working in a later release. If you need to specifiy a single IPv6
address in a field that are defined as a list of host names or IP
addresses, please prefix "<;" to explicitly specify the list separator
as a semicolon. Otherwise, the code cannot tell an IP address from a
colon-separated list of strange host names.
-----

Will this address your issue? Or do you have a better idea?

Greetings
Marc

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