Re: Musings about Usernames in adduser and Debian
Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> writes:
>> On the other hand, as long as this is admin-controlled, it doesn't
>> matter much. I could see that viewpoint, but I wonder how much latent
>> breakage would be introduced that will take years to fix in all tooling
>> and all packages.
>
> Yes. Fixing breakage makes software better, and by disallowing non-latin
> characters in user names we are hiding those issues away.
This is arrogant. Assuming that a username can be displayed, sorted,
compared and typed using strict us-ascii is not a bug today. It's not
"hiding" any issue.
The question is whether it makes sense to introduce a new class of bugs
by changing the rules. And we can pretty much guarantee that some of
those bugs are securty critical, since this is all about authentication
and authorization.
Knowingly introducing security bugs does not sound like a good idea.
For what purpose?
Bjørn
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