5 Sep
2017
5 Sep
'17
7:18 p.m.
Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
|On Mon, Sep 4, 2017, at 14:32, Doug McIlroy wrote:
|> Because of the model 33, login names were case-insesitive.
|> Come to think of it, I don't know whether they still are
|> in general, though they must be for email to be delivered by
|> login name.
|
|Looking at the code for getty in various versions, it looks like 4.2BSD
|and System V changed this to "if the name was entered in all uppercase,
|convert it to lowercase, else leave it alone" - 4.1cBSD and System III
|(and earlier) had it unconditionally convert to lowercase, detecting
|whether it was entered in all uppercase in order to set the tty mode.
|
|As for email, the email standards don't make any guarantee that the
|username portion of addresses will be case insensitive. From what I can
|find, sendmail by default converts all characters in the username
|portion to lowercase (thus allowing email addresses to be
|case-insensitive for delivery to local usernames that must be in all
|lowercase), and has an option to treat it as case-sensitive instead.
|
|(All of this can probably be rounded down to "Usernames should be
|defined as all-lowercase")
If i recall correctly the email standards go for case-preserving
all through, to leave it up to the destination to apply whatever
is appropriate locally.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)