From: "Jan Djärv" <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>
To: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: getpwent, user-full-name and utf-8
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 09:17:05 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <46023B81.2090201@swipnet.se> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <86tzwdn2ug.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
David Kastrup skrev:
> Jan Djärv <jan.h.d@swipnet.se> writes:
>
>> David Kastrup skrev:
>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>>>
>>>>> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>>>>> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:58:08 +0100
>>>>>
>>>>> I propose that we bite the bullet, assume a fixed external system
>>>>> encoding of utf-8 for such strings, and recode accordingly.
>>>> I'd rather assume that usernames are encoded in the locale's
>>>> encoding, not necessarily in UTF-8.
>>> That assumes that every user operates under the same locale, and that
>>> this locale agrees with the locale of the system files. In particular
>>> on multi-user machines, that is not realistic.
>> Since users themselves can set their full name,
>
> Since when?
>
> Well, I took a look at the manual page of passwd(1) on my GNU/Linux
> system, and the description indeed says:
>
> passwd also changes account information, such as the full
> name of the user, the user's login shell, or his/her
> password expiry date and interval.
>
> Amusingly, however, there is no option for doing any of that except
> the password related stuff.
>
> There is, however,
>
> CHFN(1) -- 06/06/2006 -- User Commands
Yes that is what I meant.
>
...
> /etc/login.defs. (The default configuration is to prevent
> users from changing their fullname.)
>
> So with the default settings, a user can't change his settings.
Ok, I haven't seen that restriction before.
>
>> I'd think the user locale would be a good choice.
>
> It is not the worst choice, but I consider it likely that a better way
> would be something like a separate "system locale". For lack of
> better information, one could let it default to the user locale, but
> it should be at least configurable separately.
>
> Does anybody have access to the X/Open or Posix specs? Maybe
> something is said about this in there.
>
They don't say anything, they don't specify any passwd or chfn program. The
description of <pwd.h> just says:
The <pwd.h> header shall provide a definition for struct passwd, which shall
include at least the following members:
char *pw_name User's login name.
...
and that is about it.
I checked some of the machines I have accounts on, but no admin access to, and
they all use Latin-1 (which BTW is not my locale, UTF-8 is). So some system
locale may not be a bad idea, but default UTF-8 is OK.
Jan D.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2007-03-22 8:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2007-03-21 9:58 getpwent, user-full-name and utf-8 David Kastrup
2007-03-21 19:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2007-03-21 20:51 ` David Kastrup
2007-03-22 2:30 ` Miles Bader
2007-03-22 7:01 ` Jan Djärv
2007-03-22 7:40 ` David Kastrup
2007-03-22 8:17 ` Jan Djärv [this message]
2007-03-22 9:06 ` Jan Djärv
2007-03-22 5:01 ` Richard Stallman
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