Re: Yet another attempt to specify GECOS Lassi Kortela 27 Aug 2019 16:30 UTC

>> In fact, the canonical implementations only uppercase the first char
>> if it's an ASCII byte. We should probably follow suit. Who has
>> non-ascii characters in their username?
>
> That most certainly works for me, modulo my not seeing the sense of
> trying this in the first place.

The sole purpose is to follow the de facto standard implementations
which unanimously uppercase the first letter. The whole subfield and
ampersand thing makes no sense anymore (if it ever did), but for some
reason it is still used widely.

>> Might also be worth clarifying what to do in case there are empty
>> subfields
>
> I was thinking they'd be returned as empty strings in the list, and
> you're right about Debian, or in this case downstream Ubuntu, which
> turned the full name I supplied into "Harold Ancell,,," Excluding any
> would be sub-optimal unless all are empty.

Yeah - that's exactly how it does it,,, :)

Agree that empty strings are the right thing.

> We might want to weaken "is the user's real name" to "is by convention
> the user's real name", human system admins can put *anything* in there.

You're right. How about "display name" which is consistent with Windows
API and aptly describes how reliably it can be parsed :p