Colour my surprise when I did an “ls -l /var/lib” and saw:

[…]
drwxr-xr-x  3 root                    root                     4096 Oct  1  2019 ucf/
drwxr-xr-x  2 root                    root                     4096 Jul  6  2012 update-rc.d/
drwxr-xr-x  2 root                    root                     4096 Sep  7  2012 urandom/
drwxr-xr-x  3 root                    root                     4096 Feb  7  2007 vim/
drwxr-xr-x  2 root                    root                     4096 Feb 17  2020 xfonts/
drwxr-xr-x  2 root                    root                     4096 Dec 17  2015 xml-core/

That’s *massively* too wide. Scrolling up revealed the culprit:

drwxr-xr-x  2 debian-security-support debian-security-support  4096 Feb 17  2020 debian-security-support/

Unix usernames are supposed to be up to 8 characters (in fact, some
environments fail if they are longer, silently truncate them, or
otherwise explode). This is… untenable.

Please change this. Thanks!

control: severity -1 wishlist
# or minor, not sure..
thanks

Hi Thorsten,

thank you for flying debian-security-support and filing bugs!

I share your surprise... (and I joined maintenance of the package long after
this has been implemented the way it is.)

too wide for what? and maybe rather: if that's a problem, why not use ls -ln /var/lib?
'ls -l' is not ment to be parsable...

also:

$ tput cols
295
$ tput cols
81
$ tput cols
128

(all on different terminals I have currently running here...)

says who? (besides you obviously :) and then GNU's not unix ;)

"untenable" (which means indefensible AIUI) is plain wrong, because...

change has a cost, you know :)

So why and how exactly should this be changed, what would be your migration
proposal and could you maybe be so kind and provide patches?

I'm not totally opposed to the idea, but I don't see how we can sensibly
fix installed systems as removing users is a no-go and I believe renaming
them is also a bad idea. Which leaves adding another user (for existing
installs) and then probably changing ownership for the existing files -
all actions where I see potential problems for little benefit.

Maybe/probably you could convince me by providing an migration plan and patches
*and* the offer to help fixing potenial fallout...(!)

I definitly don't have a hard stance on this, I just don't share the
pain/problem and I see problems on the road for little benefit to me.

(because reasons I gave in that very mail) and
unless of course you 'show explosions' in Debian (due to this)...

Holger Levsen dixit:

For reasonable terminals (~80-100 columns).

The person who was pissed off by getting a shell account on
a GNU/Linux box “mirabilo”…

bye,
//mirabilos

No, the only way I've seen them sold is for $40 with a free OpenBSD CD.
	-- Haroon Khalid and Steve Shockley in gmane.os.openbsd.misc