[TUHS] Line Terminators in Text Files

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Tue Sep 5 23:18:38 AEST 2017


Random832 <random832 at 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)



More information about the TUHS mailing list