tags 432562 +wontfix thanks This one time, at band camp, Ian Jackson said: > > Several packages have started creating system users whose names > contain uppercase letters.
I only know of Debian-exim. Are there others? > These names for system users have some advantages over normal names, > particularly: > * It is easy to tell such a system user from a normal user even > if it uses a normal-user-range uid and has a per-user group. This would be a bug in the maintainer scripts for creating a system user in the user range. > * Mail delivery systems etc. typically won't deliver to such > users (because they lowercase the name before lookup) This is a problem. Normally system accounts get their email redirected to a real user via /etc/aliases - if we start creating system accounts with names that the MTA won't deliver, then we risk losing status email from the services. This seem like a bad plan, and is in fact, the main argument I can see against this idea. > * These names do not clash with names created for normal users > because normal user-creation tools refuse to create them. Isn't this precisely what you are asking us to change? > * Most other tools behave properly with usernames containing > capitals. Do you know which currently fail? If any reasonably common pieces of software misbehave with usernames like this, that is a fairly strong argument for leaving things as they are, until the software is patched to not do badly. > Currently packages that create system users with any uppercase letters > in the name need to pass --force-badname to adduser. This is not > ideal; for example, it gives package maintainers the idea that a name > with a capital letter is not significantly better than one containing > punctuation, top-bit-set octets, etc. Which it seems, from the above, is correct. > I propose that we relax this restriction. The attached patch causes > adduser to allow uppercase letters but only if --system is specified. > (This is achieved by a separate NAME_REGEX_SYSTEM config option.) > > FYI, this is being deployed in Ubuntu as adduser 3.103ubuntu1. I await feedback about how the experiment with upper case names goes. For now, I think I am going to be conservative, sorry. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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