Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 184163
username haldaemon exceeds 8 chars in length
Last modified: 2013-03-05 22:45:04 EST
Description of problem: The username "haldaemon" is 9 characters in length and violates a long standing convention of 8 character maximum username lengths. This has a real world impact in the output of the "ls" and "ps" commands. Besides the visual glitches and mis-alignments from those commands, they are often used as input to shell scripts which might mis-execute when their input changes. Additionally, old tar and cpio may not deal well with username > 8 chars.
It is too late to fix this in hal. Presumably the tools should be fixed to deal with long user names.
It would be great if it was fixed for FC5, but not expected given the late date. You can't fix "ps" or "ls". How about fixing this when rawhide opens again for FC6?
Nope, it would break upgrades etc., not going to happen. Plus, I know Debian has the same policy and I think they now regret they are using the user name 'hal' as it's a somewhat common name at least here in the US. Sorry.