Re: [patch] fork optional branch point normazilation

[Brad Roberts <braddr@puremagic.com>]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Brad Roberts wrote:
> >
> > (ok, author looks better, but committer doesn't obey the AUTHOR_ vars yet)
>
> They should't, but maybe I should add COMMITTER_xxx overrides. I just do
> _not_ want people to think that they should claim to be somebody else:
> it's not a security issue (you could compile your own "commit-tree.c"
> after all), it's more of a "social rule" thing. I prefer seeing bad email
> addresses that at least match the system setup to seeing good email
> addresses that people made up just to make them look clean.
>
> Mind showing what your /etc/passwd file looks like (just your own entry,
> and please just remove your password entry if you don't use shadow
> passwords).
>
> Maybe I should just remove _all_ strange characters when I do the name
> cleanup in "commit". Right now I just remove the ones that matter to
> parsing it unambiguosly: '\n' '<' and '>'.
>
> (The ',' character really is special: some people have
>
> 	Torvalds, Linus
>
> and maybe I should not just remove the commas, I should convert it to
> always be "Linus Torvalds". But your gecos entry is just _strange_. Why
> the extra commas, I wonder?)
>
> 		Linus
> -

I fully agree with the intent of the field separation, they're two very
different activities.

braddr:x:1000:1000:Brad Roberts,,,:/home/braddr:/bin/bash

All gecos entries on all my debian boxes are of the form:

   fullname, office number, office extension, and home number

This is taken from the chfn man page on debian.  Looking on my nearest
redhat box, the chfn man page is roughly the same.  Debian's man page also
has one snippit that's not in redhat's, suggested delimiter is a ','.  A
bit of searching for other platforms, aix suggests a ';' as a delimiter.
HPUX seems to want a ','.

Later,
Brad