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Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:41:56 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM>
Message-Id: <199610072141.QAA06214@compound.Think.COM>
To: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com
Cc: isp@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: User name length limit increase
References: <199610071937.MAA06009@athena.tera.com>
	<199610071947.OAA13921@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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: Aside from the traditional "size" argument, I don't see anything that would
: prevent a site from doing this.  ON THE OTHER HAND, I see no particularly
: good reason to implement it as default .. particularly with 64 characters.

What *should* it be, then?  ((1<<N)-1, rather than 1<<N, IMHO, but I
will not press the point.)  8 is obviously too small.  16 is too small
for many people.  Consider, the majority of persons want logins which
correspond to the entity name.  Tony.Kimball would be reasonable for
me.  But what if my name is
Gwendolynne.Hypatia.Josephine.Davenport-Pembroke-Smythe?  It is likely
that in many cases such a name would be contracted in some way, but in
cases where the account exists purely for automated use, it is more
direct and suitable to use the lengthy original.

I think the point is that for the default distribution, if you make a
hard limit, it should be large enough so that, when averaged over the
user community, the mean cost of conforming to it is not significantly
greater than the cost of increasing it.  Gwendolynne ("Wendy" to her
friends) would prefer 64 (or 63 in an ideal world) over 32 (ideally, 31).