Be a bit more verbose about login name length.

svn path=/head/; revision=3160

FAQ/misc.sgml

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-<!-- $Id: misc.sgml,v 1.4 1998-06-08 04:00:59 jkoshy Exp $ -->
+<!-- $Id: misc.sgml,v 1.5 1998-07-23 14:10:03 jkh Exp $ -->
 <!-- The FreeBSD Documentation Project -->
 
   <sect>
@@ -126,14 +126,29 @@
       </heading>
 
       <p>You'd think it'd be easy enough to change <bf/UT_NAMESIZE/ and rebuild
-      the whole world, and everything would just work. Unfortunately there's
-      scads of applications and utilities (including system tools) that have
-      hard-coded small numbers (not always "8" or "9", but oddball ones
-      like "15" and "20") in structures and buffers... and it would break
-      Sun's NIS clients and no doubt cause other problems in interacting
-      with other UNIX systems.
+      the whole world, and everything would just work. Unfortunately there
+      are often scads of applications and utilities (including system tools)
+      that have hard-coded small numbers (not always "8" or "9", but oddball
+      ones like "15" and "20") in structures and buffers.  Not only will
+      this get you log files which are trashed (due to variable-length
+      records getting written when fixed records were expected), but it can
+      break Sun's NIS clients and potentially cause other problems in
+      interacting with other UNIX systems.
 
-      <p>FreeBSD 3.0 and later will have 16 character names, however.
+      <p>In FreeBSD 3.0 and later, the maximum name length has been
+      increased to 16 characters and those various utilities with
+      hard-coded name sizes have been found and fixed.  The fact that this
+      touched so many areas of the system is why, in fact, the change was
+      not made until 3.0.</p>
+
+      <p>If you're absolutely confident in your ability to find and fix
+      these sorts of problems for yourself when and if they pop up, you
+      can increase the login name length in earlier releases by editing
+      /usr/include/utmp.h and changing UT_NAMESIZE accordingly.  You must
+      also update MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h to match
+      the UT_NAMESIZE change.  Finally, if you build from sources, don't
+      forget that /usr/include is updated each time!  Change the appropriate
+      files in /usr/src/.. instead.</p>
 
     <sect1>
       <heading>Can I run DOS binaries under FreeBSD?</heading>