On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 08:44:31PM +1000, Martin Michlmayr wrote: > * Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003-05-11 11:40]: > > retitle 192660 ITA: makepasswd -- Generate and encrypt passwords > > thanks > > > > I'll take it. I'm trying to contact Rob Levin to find out whether it's > > still maintained upstream (although I suspect not). > > What does makepasswd offer that pwgen doesn't have? (also see -devel > on this)
(I've seen -devel; Frank is correct and Marco can't even have bothered to read the package description before asking whether it offered more than whois' mkpasswd. Discounting that.) Well, makepasswd is a bit more flexible in some ways; you can tell it to use only certain characters, for instance, and give it a range of lengths. Also, you can use --rerandom=1 to make it reseed the random number generator straight out of /dev/random for every byte (accepting that you may have to hit a key every so often to generate more entropy), while pwgen always settles for the PRNG in /dev/urandom on systems that have it. I'd initially missed the option to pwgen that allows you to pick the length of the generated passwords, though, which would've been a serious lack. pwgen tries to generate pronounceable passwords by default (there's a --secure flag to disable this), which isn't available in makepasswd. I suppose makepasswd isn't a major feature improvement over the combination of pwgen and mkpasswd, so if somebody wanted to remove it I wouldn't object too strongly. I don't think it's entirely redundant, though. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
