Feargal Reilly wrote:
I had a look last night and could not find a formal definition of it.
Common usage however indicated that most flavours of unix treat it the same. It
is a comma seperated list which takes the following order:
Full name, Office Location/Room Number, Office/Work Phone Number, Home Phone
Number, Other/Miscellaneous.
Many applications look up the first field to insert a user's name. Some, such
as finger, chfn, and adduser uses the other information too. I checked this on
FreeBSD, Debian, Red Hat, and Solaris.
Apparently Solaris they only used two labels - Full Name and other.
This tells me that the field is basically a hack, and doomed to be
non-standard and non-portable until approximately 3 years after it
appears in an RFC. Maybe if there was a way to define the format in
dbmail.conf it would be portable enough.
I agree on you with using the client_idnr for tying to other databases; the
GECOS field is not intended for that. I suggest it as it satisfies the needs of
many people who do not need to develop a full blown user management database.
Another issue with having a gecos field in the DBMail user table that
DBMail itself does not use is wasted space. A comma-separated list of
text data would probably be best implemented as a varchar(255) field, or
even a tinyblob (that's max 8K, right?). As you scale up, that could be
a lot of space, and for an awful lot of people this space would be unused.
On the other hand, the long int client_idnr field, while not strictly
necessary (the tie-in could be made in another table or db), is nice and
takes a lot less space per row than arbitrary text data.
I would suggest that if renaming the client_idnr field, it should be called
'group' or 'group_idnr'.
Naming it 'group' implies a specific meaning for the field, and
therefore would be confusing to new users/developers. Any new name
should imply *any* use the application desires. Something like
'external_idnr' would be sufficiently generic.
--
Will Berry
Co-founder, Second Brain website hosting
http://www.secondbrainhosting.com/
