amilojko said:
I wouldn't say it's a "stupid" detail, I'd say it's a "trivial" detail, but it takes an hour to recompile the source to support longer usernames.
And exactly because it's trivial, it should be done right from the start.
This is one of the things that comes up every now and then, and ends up with the status quo. Changing this counts as an ABI change, so it would only happen in a new major release. Since 9.0 is in the process of releasing, that means that this change would have to wait for 10.0 (or 10-CURRENT if you want to run prerelease software).
In the other BSD's I looked at just now, NetBSD is 16, OpenBSD is 32, and DragonFly is 16.
I tilted at this particular windmill years ago (under BSD/OS and later FreeBSD) and during the time I needed it (at a previous job)*, it was one of a number of things that I changed in the base system. As I recall, there are a couple places which had it hardcoded at 16 - I think
top might have been one of them. But that was over 10 years ago, and things have probably changed.
I have a number of limits I change in the base system (ARGMAX, among others). I accept the fact that I need to compile everything myself.
I don't think you're going to get anything useful asking for this change, both because as I mentioned above, you wouldn't see it until 10.0, and because this isn't the place to reach the developers and attempt to convince them of the need for this feature. And if you do want to post to the developer's mailing list, I'd suggest researching the reasoning behind OpenBSD's implementation of this change. You may find other things there that will help your proposal.
* I implemented a single-signon environment which had (among other things) a number of VMS systems, an IBM mainframe, Netware (yes, it was that long ago) and BSD/OS (and later FreeBSD). As the VMS systems were the senior members, everything else had to adapt to the usernames on that system, which were up to 16 characters in length (before FreeBSD 3.0, the limit was 12).