Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 133273
should autogenerate account name from real name
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:49 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040809 Epiphany/1.3.8 Description of problem: This is a relatively minor thing, but one improvement I think we could do to firstboot is have the real name field be above the account name one. When I first start typing in my real name, a sensible account name (last name + first letter of first name maybe) should be automatically generated from that. Of course the user should still be able to override this by deleting the autogenerated name and retyping it. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firstboot-1.3.25-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Enter real name 2. Account name doesn't update Additional info:
There are a variety of schemes that could be used to come up with account names and we're likely to not pick one that most people would want. In addition, lots of people are going to have names that do not translate well to usernames (due to special characters, etc.) or will want to use something completely unrelated to their real name (a handle, nickname, etc.)
Point by point: Variety of schemes - sure, but if your organization enforces a scheme, autogenerating a default doesn't hurt, you just retype it. I bet most enterprises don't have their end users go through firstboot anyways. One most people would want - If you care, you override the suggestion Names that don't translate to Unix account names - This is a *good* reason to autogenerate suggested account names. It might not be obvious to a new Fedora user that they can't use non-ASCII in their account name, by autogenerating a suggestion we make it clearer. Will want to use something unrelated - Again, just override it, it's not hurting these people Finally, look at it this way: While a lot of tech workstation users may care about the account name because they're Unix nerds, if we want Fedora to be a more mainstream OS, we should hide/background implementation details like the Unix account name in favor of presenting things to the user in terms that make sense to them, like their real name. So a corresponding change would be to make GDM display a list of users with their full real name that they could pick from.