From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Title: full names in news 2.7
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2344
Posted: Wed Jun  9 17:18:01 1982
Received: Thu Jun 10 00:45:34 1982

With (apparently too) little warning, in 2.7 there is a new feature that
puts your full name in parentheses in the "From" field of your article.
It looks up your entry in /etc/passwd, and checks the gecos field,
which often contains people's full names.  Alas, it often DOESN'T
contain people's full names, or something else comes first, or it's
in some funny format.  Thus, people are sending out articles calling
themselves "pri=-2", "CB2C249", their IBM job numbers, and so on.
(Note that I think the older versions of news - 2.6 and earlier - will
not forward full names since they stop at the first blank.  So you'll
still be getting lots of unsigned articles for some time.  This article
has my name in it but if it passes through any machine that didn't
install 2.7 within 24 hours, to get to your machine, it won't be signed.)

The best solution is for each site to edit their /etc/passwd field
to put the full name FIRST in the gecos field.  Anything after a
comma or semicolon in the field will be ignored.  Thus, you should
list your name in left-to-right order with no commas, e.g.
:Mark R. Horton,foo,bar,mumble: rather than :Horton, Mark,foo,bar,mumble:
or :pri=-2,Mark Horton,foo:  Note that netnews assumes the Berkeley
conventions used by finger(1) - in particular, & will expand into your
login name, thus :& Horton,foo,bar: will expand since my login name
is "mark".  (It will upper case it for you.)  The & feature doesn't help
much if your login is your initials.

If for some reason you can't change this (either you have a piece of
software that can't reasonably be changed that insists on ITS FAVORITE
FIELD being first, or you can't write /etc/passwd, or there are
political problems) the second choice is to change netnews.  The place
to look is the routine gensender in ifuncs.c, and the routine
buildfname that it calls immediately following.  If you fit into this
category I'd like to hear from you what your excellent reason is - if
enough people fall into the same category, maybe some kind of common
standard can be developed that fits everything.

	Mark