Re: getpwent, user-full-name and utf-8

[Jan Djärv]

David Kastrup skrev:
> Jan Djärv <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > David Kastrup skrev:
> > > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> > >
> > > > > From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> > > > > Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:58:08 +0100
> > > > >
> > > > > I propose that we bite the bullet, assume a fixed external system
> > > > > encoding of utf-8 for such strings, and recode accordingly.
> > > > I'd rather assume that usernames are encoded in the locale's
> > > > encoding, not necessarily in UTF-8.
> > > That assumes that every user operates under the same locale, and that
> > > this locale agrees with the locale of the system files.  In particular
> > > on multi-user machines, that is not realistic.
> > Since users themselves can set their full name,
>
> Since when?
>
> Well, I took a look at the manual page of passwd(1) on my GNU/Linux
> system, and the description indeed says:
>
>         passwd also changes account information, such as the full
>         name of the user, the user's login shell, or his/her
>         password expiry date and interval.
>
> Amusingly, however, there is no option for doing any of that except
> the password related stuff.
>
> There is, however,
>
> CHFN(1) -- 06/06/2006 -- User Commands

Yes that is what I meant.

>
...
>         /etc/login.defs. (The default configuration is to prevent
>         users from changing their fullname.)



> So with the default settings, a user can't change his settings.

Ok, I haven't seen that restriction before.

> > I'd think the user locale would be a good choice.
>
> It is not the worst choice, but I consider it likely that a better way
> would be something like a separate "system locale".  For lack of
> better information, one could let it default to the user locale, but
> it should be at least configurable separately.
>
> Does anybody have access to the X/Open or Posix specs?  Maybe
> something is said about this in there.

They don't say anything, they don't specify any passwd or chfn program.  The 
description of <pwd.h> just says:

  The <pwd.h> header shall provide a definition for struct passwd, which shall
  include at least the following members:

  char    *pw_name   User's login name.
...

and that is about it.

I checked some of the machines I have accounts on, but no admin access to, and 
they all use Latin-1 (which BTW is not my locale, UTF-8 is).  So some system 
locale may not be a bad idea, but default UTF-8 is OK.

        Jan D.