Password issues

[Andre Robatino]

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

> If you run passwd as your own user, compared to passwd as root changing
> your user password, you will see that running passwd as your own user
> will result in the same result as running the password change from
> System Settings (You recieve a passwd is too short message). The only
> time you can avoid the "password to short" message, is when running
> passwd as root.

Yes, I understood that, but you're missing my point. What I described is an
inconsistency between running *passwd* as root, vs. running the *graphical
password tool* (NOT passwd!) as root (by which I mean with the page unlocked
using the root password). One allows arbitrarily short passwords (except for
zero length) and the other does not, even when *both* are being run as root.