[Mageia-discuss] Feature request: uppercase letters in user names

[Simon Parsons]

On 14/12/2011 11:00, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote:

>
> The local-part of the email address may use any of these ASCII characters RFC
> 5322 Section 3.2.3:
> <snip>
>
> Ron.

I suppose this has been thought about many times, but let's have another go:

Unix name: simonnzg
Real Name: Simon Parsons
e-mail name: well, lots of them, actually.

User names do not have to be equal to e-mail names. That's what 
/etc/aliases is for, amongst other things.

It's a bad idea to have a fixed distinction between upper and lower case 
user names - people, word processors and mobile text input systems tend 
to capitalise names so most pragmatic e-mail systems assume "a=A", for 
instance.

There is no reason why it should not be possible to alias user names so 
that they log on with whatever they want, but their "real" Unix user 
name is all lower case.  This happens with Samba now and the standard 
Mageia "click on your name to login" login screen uses the user's name 
rather than the Unix user name.

In this case, it MAY be possible to add an option for a "click on your 
capitalised user name to login", but I don't know if that's worthwhile. 
  If a user wants to be known as SimonNZG instead of simonnzg (in my 
case), then that is usually usually because it's a team login and not an 
individual one, so the user's Real Name can be set to SimonNZG and the 
problem is solved.

Additionally, you could simply make the name entered into the login box 
case agnostic, but that would no-doubt break all sorts of stuff if it 
wasn't mapped to a real Unix user name. It's perfectly doable, though.


Simon