Re: UTF8

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

> As far as I understand, Unix /etc/passwd only support ASCII
> usernames,

I've seen this, or equivalent things, claimed before.  I finally tried
it, and it's not true, at least not for the Unix variant I have at
ready hand (five-year-old NetBSD).  I created a user whose name is 0xe5
0x67 0x65 (Latin-1 "åge" - I happen to know of someone named Åge).
vipw did not complain.  I set its password; passwd did not complain.
"su åge" worked.  "ssh localhost -l åge" worked, too, with an ssh
that's ssh 1.2.14 in all username-processing respects.

Sorry to go injecting fact into a good flamefst, but there you have it.
At least one octet-string system - with a legacy ssh - does in fact
support 8-bit usernames, at least minimally.  (I'd try an ssh2 test of
it, but the only ssh2 implementation I have on that system is my own,
which at the moment is encoding-agnostic even on the wire, so it would
prove nothing.)

> I'm not sure I see the problem.  Implementations that doesn't know
> what charset their authentication database uses, will be limited to
> ASCII, or whatever safe subset they can assume.

Why?  Why should one octet-string system talking to another
octet-string system be unable to use non-ASCII octets?

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse%rodents.montreal.qc.ca@localhost
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B