Possibly a duplicate of 0010127.

See bug 0007144 for the rationale for the check. There is also a feature to allow duplicate real names.

Changing the label to "Display Name" does make sense.

I think it's common sense that real names are not unique, sometimes you get fooled by this in real life but usually you quickly realize who is who.

IMHO, this is a (lame) limitation that should be removed from all (default) installations

Please read the original bugs before making broad statements.

If I change my "real name" to giallu, then spam all over the tracker, who is to know it wasn't you???

@thraxisp:
You don't remove that problem by making real names unique. If your "real name" variable is "Geoffrey Wiseman" and you spam all over this bug tracker, someone might well think it's me, because that is my real name. If you want a way to ensure that identity is clear, you'll have to do that through good profiles, email address verification and the like, same as every other web application.

IMO, anyway.

I'm not saying this isn't problematic, I'm just saying that the current solution makes things worse rather than better.

I actually read those bug reports (I assume you refer to 0004198 and 0003975) and yet I fail to see how this is a good fix.

If there are places in the interface where ambiguity exists, we should add some disambiguation rule. For instance, I'd prefer showing "real name (username)" or "real name <email>" which are going to be unique.

Additionally, we probably don't need anymore the check because the user's name in each comment is hyperlinked to a user's info page. That page is now mostly empty, but it contains enough info to tell apart two users.