Jeff Vian wrote:
Be very careful about insisting that non-ascii characters be accepted in the passwd file. This file contains data that by design must be universal across all locales, and making it local specific will generate nightmares for system admins and programmers. (As well as distros that are 'locale specific'.) I can see that it would cause maintenance headaches that would be huge.
An example would be a company that has offices globally, and uses a single site for access control. Users in one locale have their machines set specific to that locale, and in other locales they are set similarly. How is the access control part supposed to know which locale specifics to use before granting access?? The universal standard ascii restrictions on critical data used for this is much better than locale specific.
Of course there must be a universal standard. It must be specified that regardless of locale, /etc/passwd is always encoded in one certain character encoding. But why would that encoding have to be ASCII and not UTF-8?
If /etc/passwd is restricted to ASCII, then forget about storing users' real names there. Being restricted to ASCII in the username is annoying. Being forced to misspell my real name is unacceptable.
Björn Persson
