[99] in Moira
Re: Capitalization in names
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Sommerfeld)
Tue May 1 17:12:02 1990
Date: Tue, 1 May 90 17:11:25 -0400
From: Bill Sommerfeld <wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: Jerome H Saltzer <Saltzer@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-moira@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Jerome H Saltzer's message of Tue, 1 May 90 16:31:33 EDT,
If it is because the underlying DB system doesn't provide
case-insensitive comparison semantics...
I believe that this is the case, or at least it was the case back when
I worked on SMS.
The database already contains two copies of the user's name: one which
is "immutable" and is used for user registration lookup and little
else, and a second one which is changeable by "chfn" and which is
loaded into the hesiod UNIX passwd database and displayed by finger.
Given that Mr. Mcelheny can already change his user-visible name to
"John McElheny", or even "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" (should he undergo a
change in faith or get really tall :-) ) without needing to call an
admin, I think this problem is solved already.
The "baroquely complex" part of this is that the canonical form of the
first and last name used as the database key is a mixed-case string.
For the life of me, I can't remember *why* I did such a silly thing
when I wrote the first version of the database load and user
registration programs; I suspect it may have been that the test
database we were already using had mixed-case first and last names.
- Bill
