[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#304350: Always ask for root passowrd twice, even on critical priority installs?

[Raul Miller]

On 6/9/05, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> Some people have argued this does against all established practices in
> such matter. Others have argued that the way to install a system is a
> very specific way and that, after all, the password confirmation is
> not *mandatory* to have the process continuing.
>=20
> As the arguments seems quite solid both ways, I take the hard way and
> hereby ask about Your Wise Advice. The discussion inside the D-I team
> did not yield to a very strong advice, too, as far as I have analysed.

I must admit that I don't understand the argument for asking only once.

Could someone spell out those reasons for me?

I mean, I understand that implementing "ask only once" is slightly
simpler.  But but given that there's we're talking about a password
prompt, which provides the user no feedback (thus preventing
the usual mechanism for detecting keyboarding problems), this
doesn't seem to me to be a good idea.

If the point is that there's some other interface involved here --=20
where we're not really talking about a prompt but about a=20
machine interface -- I could see a "only prompt once" policy
making sense.

Anyways, if someone could spell out these arguments a bit
further it would help a lot.

Thanks,

--=20
Raul