Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
[Markus Schabel]If you limit the login-names to 8 characters you may have some problems with the generation of rememberable logins (sure, at the university you get a number that is 7 characters long [at least in austria], but that are students and not "normal users").Actually, it is not my experience that it is hard to generate rememberable logins, and I work at a university with 60000 users. None of these users have numbers in their user name, and most of them are able to remember their user name. It is not very hard to generate user names based on the real names and without any numbers in them. See webmin-ldap-user-simple for an example.
Our old username-scheme was lastname{7}firstname{1} and we had problems
with users that weren't able to remeber this (most users with that
problem were non-technical teachers) - and as I said the problem doesn't
exist at the university, but at school it exists (maybe this is because
the university had accounts before "we" [that was before my time]
thought about it)
Since I don't know any system that needs usernames to have a maximum
length of 8 characters I see no problem if we use longer ones.
But we should stop this, we decided to use the long ones since there are
not problems anywhere and we have no problems with users that cannot
remember their names - and we now have no problems with guessing the
username of a person which we had before (we needed an LDAP-lookup). And
if the short names work for you, then there's no need to change.
conclusion: debian-edu should support both styles. If you have uid's
or gid's that have a maximum length of 8 characters then the system
should check new ones, and if you'd like to have longer ones the system
should also support this.
best regards,
Markus