[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#181448: Yet another "crazy" suggestion

[Christian Perrier]

tags 181448 wontfix
thanks

Indeed, the wishlist bugs for shadow are a huge can of nasty
worms...:-(


Now, we have a user requesting in #181448:

=========================================================
It is not possible to put SIP URLs like "sip:19081@fwd.pulver.com" in
the GECOS phone field. This should be allowed, because such URLs are
used for Voice over IP.

Since the GECOS information is stored in the passwd file, where colons
are used as delimiters, some means of quoting or encoding the colon will
be necessary.

Example:

screwdriver% chfn
Password: 
Changing the user information for galen
Enter the new value, or press return for the default
        Full Name: Galen Hancock
        Room Number []: 
        Work Phone []: sip:19081@fwd.pulver.com
        Home Phone []: 
chfn: invalid work phone: "sip:19081@fwd.pulver.com"
=========================================================

Indeed, even manually quoting or escaping colons in /etc/passwd
completely breaks the given entries.

I'm again very reluctant to push Tomasz to introduce a complex
escaping machanism for passwd fields, allowing the use of colons in
the GECOS field.

This would be VERY likely to potentially break out all custom
utilities relying on a basic analysis of passwd to but out fields.

So, here, I mark the bug as wontfix and wait for comments to convince
me that it's really worth the effort and absolutely not dangerous.




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