Re: Musings about Usernames in adduser and Debian
* Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> [241202 09:43]:
> On Sun, Dec 01, 2024 at 06:55:09PM -0500, nick black wrote:
> > Marc Haber left as an exercise for the reader:
> > > > * any upstream tool could say "bad idea" and refuse patches,
> > > > requiring their long term management,
> > >
> > > Depending of how important this tool is, we could get away without
> > > patching and probably not even documenting this failure.
> >
> > This kind of attitude seems self-defeating. Despite being
> > *strongly* in favor of this effort, I would oppose it if were
> > strictly a Debian thing. We can inspire the move, but going it
> > alone seems a recipe for present and future pain (think SSHing
> > from/to Debian and a non-Debian machine).
>
> I bet that other distribtions will also allow me to useradd an UTF-8
> name today. I don't think that we have patched useradd to allow this.
We did. Debian carries (since "forever") a patch in useradd to turn
off most name checking. (Trying to) remove this patch is what
started this all.
Observe:
[root@cc65635fbf00 /]# cat /etc/os-release
NAME="Fedora Linux"
VERSION="40 (Container Image)"
...
[root@cc65635fbf00 /]# useradd för
useradd: invalid user name 'för': use --badname to ignore
Not sure if mjt brought it up yet, but the sendmail interface will
also need some solution for utf8 usernames (=email address local
parts). However, it seems some sendmail implementations already
cannot cope with utf8 gecos fields.
Chris
Reply to: