Password issues

[Andre Robatino]

William Brown <william <at> firstyear.id.au> writes:

> You only need to root to ignore the bad passwd warning. If your run
> passwd as your own user, a "BAD" password, will deny the change, and ask
> you to create a better password. When you run as root, it is implied
> that you *really* want to set a "BAD" password, and that you accept the
> consquences.

I'm still seeing an inconsistency between command-line and graphical. Running
passwd as root, I can make my ordinary user password arbitrarily short (except
for an empty password which fails with the error "passwd: Authentication token
manipulation error" after entering it twice). With System Settings->User
Accounts, it won't allow a password shorter than 6 characters even if the page
is unlocked using root. (The password behavior appears identical whether or not
the page is unlocked.)