On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 12:09:33PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Thu, 13 May 2004 09:18:52 +0200, Francesco Potorti` <pot@gnu.org>
> wrote:
> >Since a proposed standard for user name spaces already exists at
> ><http://cr.yp.to/unixaccount.html> which does not involve long names
> >(but capitalized names instead), I think that Debian policy should
> >include this topic, and assess that Debian-specific user names should
> >begin or end with a capital D, be unique in their first eight
> >characters, and not be longer than, say, ten characters.
>
> Just for the record, I think that chosing a single letter "D" has way
> too much conflict potential.
>
> A more detailed analysis can be found in my answer to #248481.
>
> My proposition would be to adopt one of the examples given by the
> existing Debian packages tor, mixminion, sks, exim4 and console-log,
> using Debian-${PACKAGE}, or (maybe preferably) ${PACKAGE}-Debian, and
> of course to fix our tools to display an account name in its entirety
> or (maybe preferable) to offer a configuration option allowing the
> user to choose whether she wants to see a neatly aligned table or full
> information.
I'm probably being silly here, but I fail to see the necessity of such a
namespace.
If you create a username such as "exim4" for local purposes, and expect
no namespace conflicts when installing the "exim4" package, IMO it's not
the package at fault. Even if we create usernames like "Debian-foo" or
"foo-Debian", who's to say that this pattern will not be noticed by
people who will then think that the only valid usernames on a Debian
system are those that start, resp. end, with "Debian"?
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