Under Lucid, I created a user named test.test with useradd and can confirm that that user was then editable with users-admin, so I guess this bug can be closed.
Some interesting things discovered in my investigation completely tangential to this bug, but perhaps warranting a bug report of their own: useradd allows users to be created with punctuation marks, but adduser does not. useradd will not allow usernames containing periods, even though periods are allowed according to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, as adduser informs me. Using useradd to add a user whose name begins with a hypen is allowed, but that user can then not be removed by userdel. It also can't be removed by users-admin or deluser and it seems the only way is to edit /etc/passwd manually. This is obviously problematic. In fact, useradd allows adding users with just about any name. I added a user named k$^&! and although this apparently worked, it did not display correctly in users-admin. It was editable, but name displayed was incorrect. In fact, the username displayed was my username. Adding a user with funny punctuation via useradd, and then removing it with userdel worked okay. Adding a user with funny punctuation via useradd and then removing it with deluser, on the other hand, caused problems, including some bizarre spurious error messages apparently caused by a lack of clean string handling in the shell script. Observation: it would be nice if there were a unified, authoritative backend for handling operations on /etc/passwd; it seems that, as is typical of Linux, we have too many chefs and too many conflicting, incompatible standards. Such a backend would simplify users-admin, as well. -- users-admin won't let you change anything about a user with "invalid" username https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/222290 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to gnome-system-tools in ubuntu. -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
