Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:41:56 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM> To: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com Cc: isp@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: User name length limit increase Message-ID: <199610072141.QAA06214@compound.Think.COM> References: <199610071937.MAA06009@athena.tera.com> <199610071947.OAA13921@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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: Aside from the traditional "size" argument, I don't see anything that would : prevent a site from doing this. ON THE OTHER HAND, I see no particularly : good reason to implement it as default .. particularly with 64 characters. What *should* it be, then? ((1<<N)-1, rather than 1<<N, IMHO, but I will not press the point.) 8 is obviously too small. 16 is too small for many people. Consider, the majority of persons want logins which correspond to the entity name. Tony.Kimball would be reasonable for me. But what if my name is Gwendolynne.Hypatia.Josephine.Davenport-Pembroke-Smythe? It is likely that in many cases such a name would be contracted in some way, but in cases where the account exists purely for automated use, it is more direct and suitable to use the lengthy original. I think the point is that for the default distribution, if you make a hard limit, it should be large enough so that, when averaged over the user community, the mean cost of conforming to it is not significantly greater than the cost of increasing it. Gwendolynne ("Wendy" to her friends) would prefer 64 (or 63 in an ideal world) over 32 (ideally, 31).
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