Bug#367428: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#367428: sysvinit: last cut the username if its longer than eight charactersBcc: pre@usit.uio.no

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Also, the 8 character user name limit can be traced to POSIX, where
> only 8 characters are guaranteed to work.  See _POSIX_LOGIN_NAME_MAX in
> <URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/limits.h.html>.
> I believe it is smart to limit user name lengths to 8 characters until
> that limit is increased.

We have a problem here.  Debian is not POSIX, and in Debian usernames are
already longer than 8 characters, plain and simple.  Anything that expects
them to be only 8-chars wide is already either broken, or very sub-optimal.

> I'm not sure how to best rewrite 'last' to handle longer user names,
> without surprising script writers with code already using 'last'.

IMHO, We document it in NEWS.Debian, and go right ahead. It would be
different if we didn't have >>8 chars usernames, but we already do, and for
a long while, now.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh