username field capped at 30 characters

[marqh]

in Django 1.3 and 1.4:

django/contrib/auth/models.py

defines a class:

class User(models.Model):

...

username = models.CharField(_('username'), max_length=30, unique=True,help_text=_('Required. 30 characters or fewer. Letters, numbers and @/./+/-/_ characters'))

first_name = models.CharField(_('first name'), max_length=30, blank=True)

last_name = models.CharField(_('last name'), max_length=30, blank=True)

I am using kerberos authentication to provide single sign on to my Django provided web applications. I thus obtain a username from the kerberos user management system, which has a form:

givenname.surname@…

this easily exceeds the 30 character limit, meaning that new users cannot be recreated.

Django appears to forbid the overriding of theses fields (which i tried) so my fix involved patching the Django source to enable username to be 100 characters.

I would like to see this in change incorporated into the Django release, so that I can remove my build patch. Is there a reason for such a small character limit which would make this a bad idea?

[Carl Meyer]

Thanks for the report. This has long been a known issue, but finding a path forward for fixing it is non-trivial due to the requirement of a database migration for all existing installations of Django. The issue was recently ​discussed at length on the django-developers mailing list, and a path forward was chosen that will result in a fix for this problem. That work is being tracked by ticket #3011, so I'm closing this as a duplicate of that.