From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Sep 19 18:48:13 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id SAA24666 for stable-outgoing; Fri, 19 Sep 1997 18:48:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from time.cdrom.com (root@time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA24659 for ; Fri, 19 Sep 1997 18:48:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from time.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost.cdrom.com [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.7/8.6.9) with ESMTP id SAA21123; Fri, 19 Sep 1997 18:47:59 -0700 (PDT) To: Tom cc: Studded , "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org" Subject: Re: >8 char usernames going into 2.2.5? In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 19 Sep 1997 17:39:00 PDT." Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 18:47:59 -0700 Message-ID: <21119.874720079@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I'd like to register strong disagreement with the above. The change > itself, is simple. It is going to affect packages that read/alter > utmp/wtmp/lastlog. However, since the packages will be re-built > everything will be ok, as long as people don't use old packages. I think > we should get this change behind us. It is only get to get worse. Trust me, no matter how strong your disagreement with the above, there are plenty of folks who will disagree even more strongly with the idea of changing it. They don't want to have to update or convert in-place all their log data (and some people have utmp/wtmp logs which are archived for months and used to produce billing data) and for them, 2.2-stable represents the place to be when you don't want to suffer from mid-stream changes like that. 16 character usernames have been part of 3.0 for some time and is not even difficult to add to 2.2 on an as-needed basis (sheesh, you alter two header files and make the world - how hard can that be? ;), so I don't think it's quite fair to make it sound like BSDI has had the feature for 2 years and FreeBSD users have just been totally SOL on the matter. We make our sources available at no extra charge, eh? :-) Jordan