> Yeah, 16 characters seems like plenty for a username to me too.  But
> I'd almost be willing to bet money that back when the current utmp
> format was designed, nobody saw any need for more than 8 characters in
> a username.  ("But that allows for 217,180,147,158 different usernames,
> and that's even considering only lowercase letters!")  I am _not_
> willing to bet anything at all that 16 will suffice for all time, nor
> even for the expected lifetime of whatever the redesigned utmp file
> format is.  Indeed, I would bet that it won't.  (I would be inclined to
> accept single-byte lengths in the file, implying a hard limit of 255,
> though I'd prefer two-byte lengths.)

Heh, the length of names shouldn't change that much over time (one should
think)... on the other hand, when i see what one has to type in to log into the
novell-system here... feh09020.0.rz.uni-regensburg.de is'nt a funny login to
type :-)

Keeping the length in w/utmp sounds cool, but again, it breaks binary
compatibility. :(

Hubert

-- 
=============== Hubert Feyrer ============================================
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