[support] login with email and/or "hiding" user.name

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

Hi all,
I've to move users from a legacy system to D5.

In the legacy system the user name for login was the email.

Users will produce some public content.

In many places drupal uses the user.name to refer to users but I
can't of course use users' emails to refer to users.

I can't even force the users to change the way they login. So they
have to continue to be able to login with email, password.

One way would be to automatically fill name with something
auto-generated during import and change the login process (looking
for some clean idea that won't involve changing core, form_alter?).

Any other suggestion?

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it