I noticed that aliases (not sure if this is the correct terminology) don't work in cname records.

If I have:
some-host A 10.10.10.10

Then I add a CNAME where host name is "www" and aliases to is "some-host", it gets added to the file as:

www CNAME some-host.

The trailing "." prevents it from working correctly. I think it should be:

www CNAME some-host

so that CNAME targets don't have to be fully qualified (at the very least this prevents stupid typos in the domain name part).

As far as I'm aware of, fully qualified domain names should include a trailing dot.

If you just use domain.tld (without the trailing dot) as your target, every server around the world will interpret that as a subdomain and redirect users to domain.tld.domain.tld. Which isn't what you want.

The Linode web interface is kind enough to automatically add the dot if you leave it out. The problem is that it always adds a dot, so if you use a trailing dot in your entry you'll end up with two dots.

So here's my feature request: please don't allow double dots to show up!

While that's true, that's sort of the point of my request. I don't want every single entry to be treated as fully qualified. If you leave out the dot, it should be combined with the domain automatically to form a fully qualified domain name. (at least this is how bind works)