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

[Bálint Réczey]

Hi Johannes,

Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <josch at mister-muffin.de> ezt írta
(időpont: 2024. nov. 23., Szo, 9:32):
>
> Quoting nick black (2024-11-23 08:48:10)
> > You now have glyphs which occupy more than one column. Are your
> > columnar/tabular programs prepared for that? ﷽𒁭𒐫i
>
> xfce-terminal renders this like this: https://mister-muffin.de/p/4o2v.png
>
> No idea if this is correct and I'll leave the details to those who know more
> about this topic than I. And maybe my email client completely messes this up in
> this response of mine.
>
> But my 2 cents on the topic are: Lets please allow more than ascii in
> usernames. I find it very uncomfortable every time I have to tell my students
> that sorry, you somehow have to manage writing your name using American letters
> because that's all we have after half a century of Computers being a thing...

I had students as well with many of them having accents in their name,
like myself and never had this kind of discomfort before.

If any time it occurs to me, I'll remind myself that also deeply
personal birthdays are shown as Arabic numerals instead of Roman ones
which would look way cooler, and also use the base 10 encoding instead
of base 60 which encoding was widely used by Sumers.

>
> If having this work in Debian can put a bit on pressure on those software
> projects that do not support this, then please let that happen so that missing
> unicode support becomes more annoying for those pieces of software that are
> missing it. For example, if my email client messed this up, then lets fix it.
> We cannot find these kind of bugs if we accept translating everybody's given
> name to the American alphabet.

Please don't open this can of worms and impose pointless work on
upsteams. Keep what works reasonably well for decades.

Cheers,
Balint

PS: The mandatory relevant Monty Python sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cKsBe3on5g

>
> Thanks!
>
> cheers, josch