Bug#391717: [Adduser-devel] Bug#391717: gender in /etc/passwd

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Robert Millan said:
> I'm not sure what's the best way to proceed (if I was, I'd already
> send a patch).  I was hoping we could find a way to extend and/or
> abuse the GECOS in a back-wards compatible manner.
> 
> Such "gender" field may have three values (male, female or undefined). 

I think that this opens a whole set of issues that have previously been
happily ignored; you are creating an enum here, essentially, but not
putting in possibilities for trans gender or other non biological
identifiers, which is an issue I would be really happy to not deal with,
frankly.

> The latter could mean we don't know, or we don't care.  Perhaps one of
> the fields can be abused/extended to add this information (in which
> case this is an adduser issue), or chfn could be modified to provide
> an additional field (in which case this issue belongs to the shadow
> suite).

The whole thing belongs at a lower layer than adduser, I think.  Th
efirst thing I would do is try an experiment on one of your systems and
see what goes wrong.  I suspect finger and some other tools may not
behave all that well if you add an extra field or change the semantics
of a pre-existing field (I mean a field within the gecos entry, in case
it's not clear).

If all goes well, contrary to my expectations, then I would take it up
with the shadow maintainers - adduser currently really only calls chfn
to handle the gecos entries, so if the support is there, it will be
present in adduser.
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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