openid nickname changes aren't handled

[Michael Hall]

When a user changes their nickname in Launchpad for example, their Django username doesn't get updated.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

We currently don't make any attempt to change django nicknames. I'm not even sure whether Django expects nicknames to be editable.

[Michael Hall (mhall119)]

Django shouldn't care, any connection between the User table and any other will be based on the id field, not the username field.

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

I believe if you set OPENID_UPDATE_DETAILS_FROM_SREG to True in your settings.py django-openid-auth will try to keep your details in sync with the provided sreg data.
We're not currently using this feature so I don't know if it works (I'd expect it to do some error handling if the new username collides with an existing one, for instance), but the code to do so seems to be there.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

What I was getting at w.r.t. nicknames is that many web apps treat the nickname as a persistent identifier. Launchpad's ability to change usernames at will is quite uncommon.

Now, I agree that this feature would be useful, but I think it would be worth enabling it with a second setting.