Usernames longer than 8 chars

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 07:07:30AM +0100, Henrik Carlqvist wrote:
> > 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.

As one of the Debian maintainers of D-Bus i can tell you now that we are never
going to adopts this, switching usernames is much too painfull. And i doubt any
of the other Major distributions will.  There might be 2-3 new linux
distribution every week, but in the big scheme of things only a handfull
actually matters and that set changes rarely.

> > 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".

ps -U messagebus works fine on my system and has done so for years. It's not
the fault of distributions that users don't use their tools properly.

  Sjoerd
-- 
When it's dark enough you can see the stars.
		-- Ralph Waldo Emerson,