refactored alias.c heavily especially substituted the loop-based alias_expand() with a recursive approach. Now alias_expand() wraps alias_one() which recursively expands aliases. In principle the ``data processing'' is the same but now it's clearer structured and thus easier to understand IMO. The loop might have been faster but I don't care for speed -- the most simple solution is the best. It's fast enough, that is sufficient.

#!/bin/sh
#
# generate a tar.gz archive to distribute
# generate an md5sum and a detached signature of the archive
#
# requires:
# - mercurial (hg)
# - md5sum
# - gnupg

if [ $# -ne 1 -o -e "$1" ] ; then
	echo "usage: gen-dist DEST.tar.gz" 2>&1
	exit 1
fi

dir="${1%/*}"
file="${1##*/}"

hg archive -t tgz -X .hg\* "$1"

cd "$dir"
md5sum "$file" >"$file.md5sum"
gpg -ab "$file"