saltstack/salt — pull request #2186 by archtaku (2012-10-07 02:57:26+00:00)
Title: Add FreeBSD GECOS field support, fix Linux GECOS

Modification of GECOS fields in Linux was being done with the chfn
command, part of the util-linux project. However, util-linux is not
consistent across distributions as it was forked (see util-linux-ng) and
then re-merged. The chfn command has changed in recent versions,
resulting in different command line arguments, as well as the dropping
of the "other" field.

In order to make GECOS support work across the widest range of
Linux distributions, the following has been changed:

1) Support for the "other" field has been dropped.
2) The GECOS field is manually parsed and modified using "usermod -c",
rather than chfn.