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Improve user name handling

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#333 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Start by locating the user model, the profile page, and the migration handling first_name and last_name. Review how names are displayed and edited; done means existing names are migrated, users can update a single name from their profile, and the behavior is covered by tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Currently, Patchwork user accounts have immutable first_name and last_name fields. This can result in a number of issues (see Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names for a more extensive list), but most significantly results in the following:

  • Users who go by a mononym (not uncommon in pseudonymous software developers)
  • Users cannot update their account if their name changes (not uncommon in general)

I'd suggest making the following changes:

  • Switch to a single "name" field. The two separate name fields seem to always simply be concatenated with a space for display, so this can be handled for existing users by simply doing the same in a migration. This may not be the best solution for some users (e.g. eastern name order, more than 2 names, etc…), but it'll be no worse than the current behavior, and they'll be able to fix it.
  • Provide an option to change their name from their profile page. As far as I can tell, the display name isn't used for any security-relevant purpose, so I don't believe this should cause any problems.
Dominant language
Python
Stars
317
Forks
91
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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