Re: [Devel] Recommended mapings: æ->ae, ø->oe, å->aa

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@xxxxxxxxxx>]

[Knut Yrvin]
> In a shool every pupil and teacher has an account with their real
> name «attatched» to their not-so-easy-to-get-æøå-e-mail-adress
> ;-). The address book in Kmail could be attached to the schools
> address book. It's one of the reasons why we are so eager to get the
> LDAP-solution on track. We have to take everything on step at the
> time, but something like this should be mandatory at the local
> Norwegian schools, even if it will take som development time to get
> it out of the box. Here is the more formal reason:
> 
> In for the Plan for Norwegian lanuages and Information Technology from
> juny 2001 The Norwegian Language Council say:
> 
>   The Language Council cant accept that technology limits the use of
>   the language, or decides the development of the language, or that
>   the industry makes solutions that narrows the users freedom tho
>   choose.
> 
> This plan is also backed by The Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs
> in Norway.

You seem to have strayed quite a long way away from the initial
question, which was how we should construct user names.  The Norwegian
Language Council can say what they want, but unless they are willing
to change thousand of unix programs, communication protocols,
programming interfaces and APIs, it will not have any effect on the
decision on how the user names in Skolelinux will be constructed.

  User names in Skolelinux will be ASCII only, 8 characters or less,
  and with only lowercase letters a-z (and optionally also 0-9 as long
  as the first character is a letter).  I am convinced that most other
  alternatives will give us problems in the future.  The same go for
  file group names (and user netgroups as these will have the same
  name as the corresponding file group).

There are several areas where we need to make sure any character can
be used, typed, displayed and printed.  User names is one of these.

The question on how to map from non-ascii character into ASCII is a
minor detail, and any mapping will work, as long as the resulting user
name follow the rules outlines above.