[Savannah-hackers] savannah login name restriction

[Mark H. Weaver]

I just tried to help 3diff get registered on savannah, but he got a
mysterious error message:

    There must be at least one character.

The code which generates this error message is line 61 of
savannah/www/include/account.php, which does checks on the login name:

  // must have at least one character
  if (strspn($name,"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ") == 
0) {
        $GLOBALS['register_error'] = "There must be at least one character.";
        return 0;
  }

In fact, this is checking that the first character is a letter.  It
allows letters, digits, dashes, and underscores for the rest of the
characters.  I think we should allow digits for the first character.
The only reason computer languages don't typically allow this is so
they can tell the difference between an identifier and a numeric
constant.

Furthermore, I think the error message should be changed to:

    The first character of your login name must be alphanumeric.

I would've changed this myself, but I don't know how to install
changes once they are made.  Could someone please explain the process
to me?

        Mark