Doesn't the GECOS field already cover some of this use case?

Posted Dec 21, 2024 21:18 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142)
In reply to: Doesn't the GECOS field already cover some of this use case? by khim
Parent article: Debian opens a can of username worms

I used to have a non-ASCII character in my surname, an "ö". After spending many hours of travel mentally preparing for the possibility of a heavily armed but dumb border guard making trouble for me because the UK travel company's software supplier apparently didn't realise that travellers on international journeys might have non-ASCII names (turned the "ö" into like 5 random characters) I started booking tickets with "o" instead. I figured that the kind of ignoranus who wrote the ticketing software above wouldn't notice the missing dots - and anyone who does notice will understand my explanation why I gave a false name. And this wasn't in 1960, this was ca 2001 or later. Remember, this was with a travel company. Not a local bus company, these people did substantial international travel. In fact the brand was "Eurolines" - but they couldn't even handle German names.

Similarly, until 2010 or so I would not use äöüß in filenames. Ever. To this day I still only use my native languages properly for low-risk "user-only" files - so I might use it for a LibreOffice file or a video, but I would not use it for a login username, anything in /etc, and so on. I just don't want the extra hassle. But I'm fairly advanced with IT - how is a typical user supposed to know that some software still can't handle such things, many DECADES after the problem was partially solved with Unicode? Do we really expect children today to learn a 1950s (!) encoding just so they know what characters they can use in a username? Surely there's more useful things that can be taught instead. E.g. pretty much anything else ;)

That being said: I wouldn't hold my breath for non-ASCII login usernames to become reliably usable with the infamous "long tail" of software. But huge progress has been made, and I think it's important to keep going.

Doesn't the GECOS field already cover some of this use case?

Posted Dec 22, 2024 12:26 UTC (Sun) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

One of the restrictions I set when we chose our children's name was to avoid accented characters - for the very same reason, to avoid possible problems during travel. For various reasons I lifted this restriction for our third child - of course he was the one born abroad :-) I was very (and pleasantly) surprised when the British clerk managed to produce a proper ó for the birth certificate - I think she saved us quite a headache.

we really expect children today to learn a 1950s (!) encoding

What they need to know is the English alphabet. And as English is the international language nowadays, we can expect them to learn this while they learn English. Besides, we're using lot of stuff "hardcoded" in the previous centuries, from the metric system to normal gauge, the Latin alphabet itself, etc. the list of characters in the original ASCII charset is just one of them.

Doesn't the GECOS field already cover some of this use case?

Posted Dec 22, 2024 13:55 UTC (Sun) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

> surprised when the British clerk managed to produce a proper ó for the birth certificate

I wouldn't be surprised, given the number of Polish people in the UK.

Doesn't the GECOS field already cover some of this use case?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 9:25 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Optimistically you could consider the problem "solved" by Unicode two decades ago, pessimistically it isn't even fully there yet today (e.g. some popular database products still do or only recently switched to full UTF-8 encodings as the default and did not support anything outside the Unicode BMP in their previous default encoding).

I wouldn't call that "solved it many decades ago".