[Pkg-shadow-devel] dpasswd and mkpasswd

[Nicolas François]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 02:29:56PM +0900, robertsong.linux at gmail.com wrote:
> hello, everyone.
> When I updated the shadow from 20000902 to shadow-4.0.18,

Welcome to the new millennium ;)

> I found the two commands had been deleted.
> Their descriptions are as bellow:
> dpasswd - change dialup password
> mkpasswd - Update passwd and group database files
> I could only find the information from the NEWS that just said
> they are deleted, but I don't know the exact reason, and
> I could not find some other information.
> Could someone explain it to me ?

First, the facts:
 * The dialout functionality of login has been removed in 2003. Hence,
   dpasswd was no more needed.

 * The NDBM functionality was removed in 2005 from all the shadow utilities.
   mkpasswd was removed shortly after.

I think these functionalities were removed because nobody use them:
 * The dialout password was replaced by better authentication protocols
   (e.g. ssh), which avoid the clear-text transmission of passwords.
 * I don't exactly know what mkpasswd was used for, but I think it was
   related to NIS, and NIS now uses a Berkeley DB, no more a NDBM
   database. The NIS passwords are now handled by the NIS commands (yp
   IIRC).
   Note that there are many other utilities named mkpasswd, which are not
   doing the same thing.

Do you really need these commands?

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral