[Pkg-shadow-devel] suggested improvement for man password

[Henry Schaffer]

I was just suggesting that the man page have better guidelines.

At this time I'm not thinking of writing a patch.

--henry

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 4:43 PM, Serge E. Hallyn <serge at hallyn.com> wrote:

> Quoting Henry Schaffer (hes at ncsu.edu):
> > In Ubuntu 14.04 I ran
> > man passwd
> > at the bottom it said:
> > shadow-utils 4.1.5.1              01/27/2016
> > PASSWD(1)
> >
> > Near the beginning of the man page, it says:
> >
> > Then, the password is tested for complexity. As a general guideline,
> >  passwords should consist of 6 to 8 characters including one or more
> >  characters from each of the following sets:
> >
> >        ·   lower case alphabetics
> >
> >        ·   digits 0 thru 9
> >
> >        ·   punctuation marks
> >
> > My suggestion is to change "6 to 8 characters" to "8 to 10 characters"
> and
> > to add one more set:
> >
> >        ·   upper case alphabetics
> >
> > --henry schaffer
> >
> > P.S. I haven't checked this man page in Ubuntu 16.04.
>
> Hi,
>
> This sounds reasonable to me, but I'm not sure based on the manpage text
> itself whether those are just guidelines, or also what passwd enforces.
> (It later says:
>
>         passwd will reject any password which is not suitably complex.
>
> )  If the latter, then passwd should probably also be updated to enforce
> those.
>
> Were you thinking of writing a patch for this?
>
> thanks,
> -serge
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-shadow-devel/attachments/20161129/6812e7e2/attachment-0001.html>