Re: getpwent, user-full-name and utf-8

["Jan Djärv" <jan.h.d@swipnet.se>]

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.