Username length

Repository of information on what it would take to increase the username length from 8 to 32.

Developers

• Add "long_usernames" to the keywords of all bugs
• When fixing use sysconf(_SC_LOGIN_NAME_MAX)

Field Engineers

There is a place holder bug# 4109819 to which you should add every customer who ever enquires about this. Please don't bother adding customers to all the subordinate bugs.

Further Info.

• The current supported limit is 8 bytes.  Since currently mulitbyte
    chars are not supported that means 8 chars.
• There may be standards issues involved with changing this beyond 32, the utmpx and wtmpx files only support upto 32 chars.
• There may be interoperatbility problems if this is changed.  
  
  If you care about this please give some of your time to helping the auditing of the code.  I'm not asking for people to fix the bugs (yet) just get them logged, but if you can then that would be great too.  Please log issues as P4/S4 RFE's unless the current limit of 8 chars is already in jepoardy.

If you log a bug please indicate in the description if the code in question suffers just from a "presentation" problem or if it would acutally be broken. If you know of potentail standards involved then please add that info to the bug as well.

If we actually change the value of LOGNAME_MAX from 8 to 32 (we will need to be sure that we don't break any standards in doing so), there will also need to be very extensive interop testing for things like rcp/rdist/uucp etc where usernames are part of the protocol.