On 4/1/2013 6:21 PM, Mouse wrote:
You may not like this. _I_ may not like it. It may not be ideal. But it's how a lot of things worked, including historical Unix, and the way a nontrivial number still work: everything is octet sequences once the bits leave the keyboard until they come back to the screen;
The biggest alternative to password files and/or ttys would seem to be PAM, like pam_ldap or pam_kerberos
LDAP has enough native support for UTF-8 that I would think checking passwords with LDAP bind could support UTF-8, but still getting everything else consistent could be tough.