[7401] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Remove "Nickname" field in GECOS?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Mar 11 16:11:24 2011
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:11:17 -0500 (EST)
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>
cc: release-team@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1103111553030.25561@INFINITE-LOOP.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1103111609110.25603@INFINITE-LOOP.mit.edu>
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Oops, I neglected to add that Athena 9 finger clients will now shift the
fields by one, and end up with output like this:
Login name: jdreed In real life: Jonathan D Reed
Nickname: N42-140V
Office: 6172530657
There was general agreement at release-team that Athena 9 users who still
rely on finger for canonical directory information should look somewhere
else.
-Jon
On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> Hi Garry,
>
> We'd like to kill off Athena finger (because its non-standard format screws
> up some OS-native utilities, like ACPI). One of the few reasons we still
> have Athena finger is that our GECOS field is non-standard, containing the
> extra "Nickname" field. Can we punt this from the Hesiod DCM? We discussed
> it at release-team today, and we believe that it will have a minimal risk,
> because:
> - most people using parsing GECOS by hand are only interested in the full
> name, and the position of that won't change
> - the primary purpose of Athena finger (to be Hesiod aware) is moot in the
> modern world
> - If you want someone's correct contact info, you want MITDIR, not finger.
> If you're amenable, we could do this now, or wait until this summer and
> advertise the change as part of the Natty upgrade.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Jon
>
