Comment 6 for bug 484238

Just checked within glibc's bugzilla database, and searching for g_get_real_name returns no results. I'll run a few more searches but I'm thinking this is one of those where they think it's a feature not a bug - as that mailing list entry, someone stated:

"Just realized that g_get_real_name() returns the whole
GECOS field rather than just the name part on Unix :-("

Then a dev replied:

"Thats not the case. If you look at the very end of g_get_any_init(),
you'll notice that we only return the part up to the first ,
My patch in 118973 may have mislead you, since I also overlooked that
section when I did the patch."

So now I'm genuinely confused. It's obviously intentially that they regex everything up to the first comma in the GECOS - but what are they expecting to be in that field? I've never seen a situation where anything *but* the person's real name appears in that field. At some point there must have been a reason, but I'm not seeing it. There are other fields for relevant data. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of that field in the user's pw entry?