Re: encoding of /etc/passwd

[Jim Breen <jwb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

["H. Peter Anvin" (Re: encoding of /etc/passwd) writes:]
>> By author:    Markus Kuhn <mgk25@xxxxxxxxx>
>> > On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>> > > Changing your locale to utf-8 will *not* for instance change the
>> > > actual encoding of /etc/password to utf-8 : it's still in iso-latin-1 or
>> > > whatever.
>> > Global files such as /etc/*, /usr/include/*, etc. obviously *must* remain
>> > in a locale invariant encoding. This is today ISO 646 IRV (US-ASCII).
>> > Hopefully it will one day become UTF-8. ISO 8859-1 has no place in
>> > /etc/passwd and similar files and should be strongly discouraged there.
>> 
>> Excuse me, but that's ridiculous.  /etc/passwd contains the names of
>> people, and well, people usually don't care when they are named that
>> they're going to be put into /etc/passwd.  The sysadmin has very
>> little control over this -- after all, the user can run chfn(1) and
>> set that up directly.  /etc/passwd should be typically be encoded in
>> the system default locale.

I totally agree with Markus. Having /etc/passwd, etc. locale dependent
is a recipe for a mess, made worse by some software dipping into it for
user identification, etc. It's a bit like DNS; until it can get to an
agreed international coding it should stay with ISO 646 IRV.
BTW, many sysadmins turn chfn off.

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen  [j.breen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/]
Computer Science & Software Engineering,                Tel: +61 3 9905 3298
P.O Box 26, Monash University,                          Fax: +61 3 9905 5146
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