>From: Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io>
>Date: Monday, August 12, 2019 6:52 AM

> [ On the various ways to get the username, etc. ]

>>> Yeah, it's pretty much the "crud that doesn't fit anywhere else"
>>> field :D I can't think of a good name for it either. One more
>>> possibility is "comment field".

>> It's a full name 99% of the time nowadays.

> Not true. It may be a full name for 99% of passwd entries, but 99%
> of systems are definitely not devoid of entries using
> commas/ampersands.  Linux routinely makes passwd entries that use
> commas, and the BSDs ship with passwd entries that use
> ampersands. Also check my survey: most systems say in their
> documentation that commas and/or ampersands are recognized.

> If we serve the raw GECOS field as "full-name", that claim will
> often be incorrect. If we serve it by the name "gecos", that name
> doesn't mean anything on non-Unix operating systems (whereas
> full-name probably has natural equivalents on most OSes). FWIW,
> POSIX doesn't even mandate having a gecos field at all.

Urk!  Right you are: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/pwd.h.html

That's an argument for not including it in this base *POSIX* SRFI,
especially when combined with the complexity of what it might contain
as you've exhaustively documented for us.

If we do, I currently advocate using the two nouns "comment" and
"gecos", one for its name, the other in the description, I'm not
particular on which for which.

>>>> current-timezone, which can be picked up from the TZ environment
>>>> variable, and in general deserves being part of its own SRFI.

>>> Agree that it should go into a date and time SRFI.

>> -1.  I want date/time to be fully portable, no dependencies on the
>> current anything except the current TAI-UTC table, which is
>> unavoidable.  See TimeAdvancedCowan.  See also my previous post for
>> the issue with TZ.

> You're right - it is a good principle to isolate a minimal OS
> interface.  In that case, I would be in favor of providing readlink
> and getenv (not necessarily in the same SRFI). They are more
> generally useful.

See my previous comment on read-link being insufficient for backups,
and for getenv we should add a requirement that either you're using an
R7RSsmall Scheme or implement SRFI 98 from which it got
get-environment-variable, since we're assuming you have such a
procedure so that you can query your PATH.

- Harold