The 'chown xxx.yyy' syntax has been deprecated for several releases
now, the correct syntax being 'chown xxx:yyy'.
The newly released stable version of coreutils, 5.2.0, now rejects the
old syntax unless _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 is found in the environment.
I have updated the spec files (in CVS HEAD) for all of the RPM
packages that I found using the old syntax, but I have not rebuilt
them. They will be rebuilt shortly -- I have notified the package
owners.
Once everything is settled down, perhaps we will be able to remove the
restriction that prevents user names containing '.'.
See also:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=116536
Tim.
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