[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#391717: [Adduser-devel] Bug#391717: gender in /etc/passwd

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Oct 08, 2006 at 05:11:06PM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Robert Millan said:
> > I'm not sure what's the best way to proceed (if I was, I'd already
> > send a patch).  I was hoping we could find a way to extend and/or
> > abuse the GECOS in a back-wards compatible manner.
> > 
> > Such "gender" field may have three values (male, female or undefined). 
> 
> I think that this opens a whole set of issues that have previously been
> happily ignored; you are creating an enum here, essentially, but not
> putting in possibilities for trans gender or other non biological
> identifiers, which is an issue I would be really happy to not deal with,
> frankly.

So me :).  That's why we have undefined and we can put anything we don't
address explicitly in that set.  This way the possibility of adding new sets
is always open, although i'm not very interested in exploring that either.

> The whole thing belongs at a lower layer than adduser, I think.  Th
> efirst thing I would do is try an experiment on one of your systems and
> see what goes wrong.  I suspect finger and some other tools may not
> behave all that well if you add an extra field or change the semantics
> of a pre-existing field (I mean a field within the gecos entry, in case
> it's not clear).
> 
> If all goes well, contrary to my expectations, then I would take it up
> with the shadow maintainers - adduser currently really only calls chfn
> to handle the gecos entries, so if the support is there, it will be
> present in adduser.

Already reassigned and contacted the shadow maintainers (see my previous mail).

-- 
Robert Millan

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