syntax of author attribute

I am curious to know if there are any limitations on the syntax of
the author attribute. In most setups, it seems the author attribute
is populated with the username of the committer, in my case something
like "wnorris". However, we are investigating the use of alternative
values to put here. Specifically, we are looking at using
mod_authnz_ldap's AuthLDAPRemoteUserAttribute to allow users to
continue authenticating with their regular username, but then passing
something else on to subversion, perhaps something along the lines of
"Will Norris (wnorris)". Is there any technical reason subversion
would not be able to handle this? Is subversion simply using the
creator-displayname in the deltav spec[0] for this? If so, it
appears that is simply defined as a string and so we should be fine.
Initial tests seem to work okay, but I wanted to try and get some
confirmation on that.

[0]: http://www.webdav.org/deltav/protocol/
rfc3253.html#PROPERTY_creator-displayname

Thanks,
Will Norris

Information Technology Services
University of Southern California