From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Oct 15 09:37:54 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id JAA18164 for chat-outgoing; Tue, 15 Oct 1996 09:37:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scanner.worldgate.com (scanner.worldgate.com [198.161.84.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA18107 for ; Tue, 15 Oct 1996 09:36:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from znep.com (uucp@localhost) by scanner.worldgate.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with UUCP id KAA20554; Tue, 15 Oct 1996 10:35:21 -0600 (MDT) Received: from localhost (marcs@localhost) by alive.ampr.ab.ca (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA11145; Tue, 15 Oct 1996 09:54:06 -0600 (MDT) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 09:54:05 -0600 (MDT) From: Marc Slemko X-Sender: marcs@alive.ampr.ab.ca To: Narvi cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 8 character login limit?! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, Narvi wrote: > > GROSS HACK ALERT > > > > 8-character programs must have login names limited to 8-character. > > the login name must be unique in the first 8-characters > > add an arg to the end of the system calls > > a pointer to a string, the longer login name, if any goes there. > > any program that works now will continue to work > > any program that has been modifid to use longer login names > > can do so. > > There are only one kind of 8-character programs - the programs written by > commercial software houses not releasing their source. In all other cases > it can be fixed by #if defined(FreeBSD) && defined (LONG_LOGINNAMES) No, in all other cases it can be defined by looking at an existing define, most likely UT_NAMESIZE. No need to do any FreeBSD specific defines since the problem (and solution) isn't FreeBSD specific. For the commercial software w/o source perspective, most of the companise that write for FreeBSD specifically should be nice enough to change their program. Most of the others either fall into the BSD/OS category, where they need to handle long usernames anyway, or the Linux catagory where... umm... it looks like most distributions have an 8 char limit, but there may well be some that don't. From a Redhat 3.x utmp.h: /* size of user name */ #if 1 #define UT_LINESIZE 12 #define UT_NAMESIZE 8 #define UT_HOSTSIZE 16 #else #define UT_LINESIZE 16 #define UT_NAMESIZE 16 #define UT_HOSTSIZE 256 #endif Looks like they are perhaps toying with it but there is something holding them back.