[Pkg-shadow-devel] Musings about Usernames in adduser and Debian

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

* Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> [241124 15:20]:
> As a data point, in our default GNOME desktop, System Settings
> (gnome-control-center) prompts for a "Full Name" first (behind the
> scenes that's the full name part of the pw_gecos field), and a "Username"
> second (this is the pw_name); and the default display mode for the
> gdm3 login prompt is to show a list of full names from pw_gecos.

> In the macOS world, it seems to be conventional and encouraged to set the
> username to a lower-case ASCII string with no punctuation, similar to the
> conventions in POSIX and <https://systemd.io/USER_NAMES/>.
> Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a reference for what characters
> macOS allows in pw_name. Perhaps a DD who has a macOS system (or a family
> member with a macOS system) could help here?

macOS generates a suggested pw_name from the fullname, approximating
it by a reduction to an (apparently) ASCII character set.

macOS is at least nice enough to try very hard to hide pw_name in
all graphical interfaces and show the full name instead. (IIRC you
can type the pw_name in if necessary.)

Chris