Bug#192660: O: makepasswd -- Generate and encrypt passwords

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 08:44:31PM +1000, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> [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                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]