> From: Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> > Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 11:20 AM >> OK; I was going from what you'd recently added to the SRFI. Is >> "first letter capitalized" sufficient in the context of Unicode >> strings?? If per SRFI 129 the first character is a titlecase >> character, what exactly should be done? > > I recommend checking only for ASCII a-z and capitalizing only > those. The thoroughness of SRFI 129 is impressive but Unix usernames > rarely if ever contain Unicode and the canonical GECOS parsers don't > grok Unicode. And John later supplied an example where titlecasing would be *bad*. > [...] > >> I wonder where and why this particular bit of ornamentation came from, > > If there are no ampersands in your realname, no part of it is > replaced or capitalized - it stays exactly as you wrote > it. Ampersands are meant for cases where people use their first or > last name as the username (which has been quite common for decades > as well). Ah, I can see that, but that's been strongly discouraged in all systems I've been involved with because of the high probability for collisions. Resulting in numerous forums where you'll see "<Firstname>2" where "<Firstname>" of course doesn't have a suffix of 1, which offends my sensibilities. > [ History. ] >> especially since POSIX usernames are allowed to be case sensitive >> (although I wouldn't try that in a world getting eaten by systemd): >> >> [ The POSIX specs. ] > > Thanks for digging that up, that is impressive diligence once again :) You're welcome, and it was good to see that POSIX is very specific about it. > On some not-too-old Unix systems it used to be that if you write > your username in all uppercase at the login prompt, it assumes that > you're using a keyboard that cannot enter lowercase characters :D > And did some things to accommodate your circumstances, like > translating to lowercase. Can't remember the details. Not sure how long it lasted, but I remember it from Version 6 days, normally it was a misfeature when you typed in your username not noticing caps lock was on. >From: Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> >Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 11:30 AM > > [ Why? To follow the well established standard. ] > >>> 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 "Real" name is indeed too strong, but I think it's much easier to understand than "display" name, which I don't recall being used often, at least in the UNIX world. I've got what I need to finish this part of the Chibi Scheme implementation, the only part not firmly nailed down is the above one you make, which is language for the SRFI. - Harold
