GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 316811
[enhancement] auto-completion in gdm field login
Last modified: 2005-09-21 07:19:30 UTC
This bug has been opened here: http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14038 "A good enhancement for gdm in a computer with hundreds of users were auto-completion of the login name when user type anything in gdm login field. The auto-completion could be made searching in login name, true-name of users and mail address. For example, if we have 3 users: (#1) tom; Tom W. Scott; tom@scott.com (#2) tom2; Tom A. Smith; j@gmail.com (#3) mamen; Maria Encarna García Fuster; maria@garcia.fuster.info when a user puts "tom" in gdm name, autocompletion shows list with users #1 and #2. So user selects apropiate item or continues to press more keys. When a user puts "tom@", then automatically, gdm substitutes "tom@" by "tom" in login field. And when a user puts "Maria Encarna", then gdm substitutes that for "mamen" in login field. It's useful for computer with several users and for more easy search of users. Thanks, Xan."
This sort of feature would compromise security. It is not a good idea to make it easy for anyone to see what users are available on the system. It might be okay if such a feature were non-default (like the Face Browser). This sort of feature would also work poorly on systems with NIS users are loaded over the network. On systems with thousands of users, it would take GDM too long to pull a complete list of user information over the network. It probably would even be too slow if there are hundreds of users. The Face Browser works around this by asking the user to configure the specific list of users who are visible in the Face Browser. I guess autocomplete could work so it supports the same userlist that the Face Browser supports. This feature doesn't seem that useful to me. The login screen isn't really the right place to have a "user search" feature on a system.
I quite agree but forwarded the bug to have upstream opinion. I'm closing it as NOTABUG, thanks for the comments.