Usernames longer than 8 chars

Henrik Carlqvist hc3 at poolhem.se
Wed Mar 26 23:07:30 PDT 2008


> It is already a configure option (configure
> --with-dbus-user=whatever),

Yes, I know, my suggestion was to change the default value. I think there
are two good reasons to do this.

1) Many packagers install software with default settings

2) Assuming that different distribution vendors shall choose a good
username by their own will mean that different distributions probably will
choose different usernames. In such a situation we will get yet another
(small) difference between distributions.

> Changing the default now would probably break packages that were not
> setting it by hand before.

Yes, that is true. Doing the change will need a big fat _warning_ in the
ChangeLog. However, the sooner the change is done the fewer distributions
will have to adapt to the change. According to distrowatch.com there are
2-3 new Linux distributions every week.

> I am inclined to think that any program that barfs on more than 8 char
> usernames in 2008 is irredeemably broken, though.

Did you try to run "ps aux | grep messagebus" on your own system from
2008? Even though ps doesn't bug out with a segfault it behaves in a way
that some users don't expect. Those users report this as a bug to their
distribution vendors which simply reply "That is not a bug, it is supposed
to do that if you have usernames longer than 8 chars".

regards Henrik
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