Usernames longer than 8 chars

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 08:49 +0100, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> 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.

Yes, excusing brokenness by default means things never get fixed.  I
would file this under NOTOURBUG especially since it is configurable.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>