Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:
Well, I have to say that from the GECOS fields I saw, none use that
format, but a lot of them used the realname,phone,something,phone,...
format.
Opinions?
If the real world GECOS were either only plain and
name,room,blah,... format as you say and assume I think a
heuristics like you suggested would be better than the
current heuristics of assuming everything is a name, but I
haven't seen what "angry mob" actually has so cannot judge.
What do popular MUAs do to come up with the real-name fields?
Don't they face the same problem, trying to using GECOS?
Dear diary, on Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 06:06:21PM CEST, I got a letter
where Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] told me that...
Petr Baudis [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
Well, I have to say that from the GECOS fields I saw, none use that
format, but a lot of them used the realname,phone,something,phone,...
format.
quoted
Opinions?
If the real world GECOS were either only plain and
name,room,blah,... format as you say and assume I think a
heuristics like you suggested would be better than the
current heuristics of assuming everything is a name, but I
haven't seen what "angry mob" actually has so cannot judge.
It uses the name,room,blah,... format.
What do popular MUAs do to come up with the real-name fields?
Don't they face the same problem, trying to using GECOS?
mutt:
{ "gecos_mask", DT_RX, R_NONE, UL &GecosMask, UL "^[^,]*" },
A regular expression used by mutt to parse the GECOS field of a password
entry when expanding the alias. By default the regular expression is
set to "^[^,]*" which will return the string up to the first ","
encountered. If the GECOS field contains a string like "lastname,
firstname" then you should set the gecos_mask=".*".
--
Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
If you want the holes in your knowledge showing up try teaching
someone. -- Alan Cox
On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:
What do popular MUAs do to come up with the real-name fields?
Don't they face the same problem, trying to using GECOS?
Since I have my pine installed in git, I could git grep it. It says
/* full name is all chars up to first ',' (or whole gcos, if no ',') */
/* replace any & with logname in upper case */
I don't know why the & rule, but there you have it..
The Perl User::pwent module seems to agree, btw (also about '&'):
"Interpretation of the gecos field varies between systems, but
traditionally holds 4 comma-separated fields containing the user's
full name, office location, work phone number, and home phone number.
An & in the gecos field should be replaced by the user's properly
capitalized login name."
I still worry about names of the type "Torvalds, Linus", but maybe that's
just not an issue.
Linus