porting question: funky uid names?

Hi pgsql-hackers,

I'm currently porting 7.0.3 to the HP MPE/iX OS to join my other ports of
Apache, BIND, sendmail, Perl, and others.  I'm at the point where I'm trying to
run the "make runcheck" regression tests, and I've just run into a problem
where I need to seek the advice of psql-hackers.

MPE is a proprietary OS with a POSIX layer on top.  The concept of POSIX uids
and gids has been mapped to the concept of MPE usernames and MPE accountnames. 
An example MPE username would be "MGR.BIXBY", and if you do a POSIX
getpwuid(getuid()), the contents of pw_name will be the same "MGR.BIXBY".

The fact that pw_name contains a period on MPE has been confusing to some
previous ports I've done, and it now appears PostgreSQL is being confused too. 
Make runcheck is dying in the initdb phase:

Creating global relations in /blah/blah/blah
ERROR:  pg_atoi: error in "BIXBY": can't parse "BIXBY"
ERROR:  pg_atoi: error in "BIXBY": can't parse "BIXBY"
syntax error 25 : -> .

I'm guessing that something tried to parse "MGR.BIXBY", saw the decimal point
character and passed the string to pg_atoi() thinking it's a number instead of
a name.  This seems like a really bad omen hinting at trouble on a fundamental
level.

What are my options here?

1) I'm screwed; go try porting MySQL instead.  ;-)

2) Somehow modify username parsing to be tolerant of the "." character?  I was
able to do this when I ported sendmail.  Where should I be looking in the
PostgreSQL source?  Is this going to require language grammar changes?

3) Always specify numeric uids instead of user names.  Is this even possible?

Your advice will be greatly appreciated.  MPE users are currently whining on
their mailing list about the lack of standard databases for the platform, and I
wanted to surprise them by releasing a PostgreSQL port.

Thanks!
-- 
mark@bixby.org
Remainder of .sig suppressed to conserve scarce California electrons...