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

[Philipp Kern]

On Sun Nov 24, 2024 at 4:03 PM CET, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> Chris Hofstaedtler <zeha at debian.org> writes:
>
> > No. I see and type my username hundreds times a day, people use it
> > to address me in written and spoken conversations with it, etc.
>
> This is confusing the subject even more.
>
> Are you sure you are talking about usernames?  Or is this email local
> parts, chat nicknames and spoken nicks?  If so, then there is no reason
> you can't use utf8. Today.  Without changing any username.

In many organizations the email local part matches the username[1] and it
is also used in spoken conversations. To the point where I needed to
make clear on internal yellow pages that I would prefer not to be called
"pkern" in spoken conversation, thank you very much.

So yes, usernames are pretty much used in spoken conversation. Many do
not actually understand what a username is and think that it reflects
how someone wants to be called - as their default assumption.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

PS: My personal, ignorant, Latin-world opinion is that it is probably
too hard for most people to type each others' usernames if UTF-8 were to
be allowed. And I would never ever use UTF-8 in a local part. And I
suffered a bit too much recently looking at differences between byte
count and character count.

[1] Referred to as "LDAP" in mine, which is both funny and sad.