Comment 8 for bug 680817

No movement on this in months? Am I correct in that it's an issue of whatever is supposed to set the alias to begin with is setting it every time, even after a change?

I see a few corrections for this.
1. Add a toggle that controls weather the user has set the alias or if the alias is under automatic control. This is likely the easiest to code.
2. Make the function that sets the default be a signal handler called only by the function that assigns the storage location of the alias. In this case the allocation of the storage location would need to be delayed until after the alias can be determined pragmatically.
3. Have the storage assignment set a non-sensible/internal default value like "Alias unaltered" and have any automatic setting of the alias be conditional on the alias being set to that value. The downside here is that there is a single alias that the user is unable to make use of, if NULL and UNSET are distinguishable then it's better to use one of these(like UNSET).

Each have there pros and cons, but any such automatic assignment of a configuration parameter should follow one of these guidelines.