> also note that the word used here, delimiter, is singular. There's a The current form is known, these are just ideas put out there.
> Having migrated from + to - (reversed my polarity, I guess) I felt I've done - (qmail) to + (postfix) hurriedly in the past to avoid a meta issue. Other users migration or dual uses aside, with that one I wanted to but did not have benefit to research whether + or - had better merits. Such as which is in more common use now, which is trending to be more prevalent in the long term. And why? Honestly, best I could come up with was the large - legacy from decade old qmail-like installations, and not requiring the shift key seemed to win, heh :) I'm sure there are more sound thoughts on the matter in a paper somewhere. > As for implementations: > > 1) One general implementation would support a list of delimiter > characters. It would first search with the complete localpart, and > ... ... ... The order > of the list of delimiter characters would have to decide the priority > of one delimiter over another. > > 2) I would expect that terminating the localpart only once, at the > first match with any delimiter, would work well in practice (basically, > replacing strchr() with strcspn()). This would make only one table > lookup with the shortened localpart. This is guaranteed to match > at most once, but it may not match what you want, when one user's > delimiter appears inside another user's name. W... yes, I think you're both on with the tie-breaking, other possible semantics I didn't think of, and cost. Another thing that comes into play is the admin will have made some analysis of their to-be-merged, or to-be-dual-used username and extension lists. Perhaps providing a few interpretations to choose from would indeed win the simple cases. Just wanted to put the idea out there and some ways of handling, maybe it would seem worthy for admins who face migrations with userbases that are their livelihood. I usually see more new rollouts, or can enforce rules, so am not the best position to suggest.
