Re: What shall we do with the GECOS field again?

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: Sep 19, 2005, 16:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20050919161636.GA18320@pasky.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <7vll1trqiq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Dear diary, on Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 06:06:21PM CEST, I got a letter where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> told me that...

Show 13 quoted lines

> Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:
> 
> >   Well, I have to say that from the GECOS fields I saw, none use that
> > format, but a lot of them used the realname,phone,something,phone,...
> > format.
> 
> >   Opinions?
> 
> If the real world GECOS were either only plain and
> name,room,blah,... format as you say and assume I think a
> heuristics like you suggested would be better than the
> current heuristics of assuming everything is a name, but I
> haven't seen what "angry mob" actually has so cannot judge.

It uses the name,room,blah,... format.

> What do popular MUAs do to come up with the real-name fields?
> Don't they face the same problem, trying to using GECOS?

mutt:

  { "gecos_mask",       DT_RX,   R_NONE, UL &GecosMask, UL "^[^,]*" },

A regular expression used by mutt to parse the GECOS field of a password entry when expanding the alias. By default the regular expression is set to "^[^,]*" which will return the string up to the first "," encountered. If the GECOS field contains a string like "lastname, firstname" then you should set the gecos_mask=".*".

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
If you want the holes in your knowledge showing up try teaching
someone.  -- Alan Cox