Usernames longer than 8 chars

[Henrik Carlqvist]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:49:01 +0100
Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd at luon.net> wrote:

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

> 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.

So instead you prefer to get bug reports like
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=411840 now and then?

Even if you would prefer to stick with the old "messagebus" username that
would still be possible to choose by the configure option. All I am
suggesting is to change the default value in the configure script.

There have been a raised concern about changing the default value will
break build scripts which assume that the default values remain the same.
If this is a concern I would suggest the following solution for the
configure script:

#### User to start the system bus as
if test -z "$with_dbus_user" ; then
    DBUS_USER=`grep msgbus /etc/passwd > /dev/null && echo msgbus || \
      grep messagebus /etc/passwd > /dev/null && echo messagebus || \
      echo msgbus`
else
    DBUS_USER=$with_dbus_user
fi

With that solution the old behavior with a default name of "messagebus"
will be kept when compiled on systems which has the user "messagebus" in
/etc/passwd but lacks the user "msgbus".

> > Did you try to run "ps aux | grep messagebus" 

> 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.

The fact that there are methods that work with long usernames doesn't mean
that long usernames work flawlessly for all users ways to do things. I did
mention ps because it was a common program most people are familiar with.
Having longer usernames than 8 chars can also break other things like NIS
or some old obscure standards like RFC 431.

IMHO a sysadm who adds a username with more than 8 chars should know what
he is doing and why he is doing it. Installing software with default
settings is in most cases not an active choice based on an analyzation of
the consequences.

regards Henrik
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