Diederik de Haas <didi.deb...@cknow.org> writes: > Hi, > > On Friday, 1 March 2024 20:46:49 CET Holger Wansing wrote: >> Philip Hands <p...@hands.com> wrote (Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:46:27 +0100): >> > If you want to make a constructive contribution, how about suggesting a >> > wording that reflects the advice that you think would be most useful to >> > the people that actually read the advice? >> >> I would like to make a proposal, leaving the default setting as is >> (aka: default to an enabled root account, no sudo), with only some wording >> changings. >> >> Patch attached. >> >> What do you think? > > I think it's an improvement and I have some suggestions, which hopefully > makes > it even better. I don't have a git-diff, but hopefully this works too. > > I'm not a native English speaker or particularly good at this, so it's more > the direction then the exact wording that's important. Others can undoubtedly > improve upon it. > > _Description: Root password: > "You need to set a password for 'root', the system administrative account.
This sentence is the thing that prompted me to change things in the first place, because it is not true. One does not _need_ to set a root password. I don't actually care very much whether we encourage sudo use. My wording ended up (after many variations) quite strongly encouraging it mostly as an antidote to the implication that comes from having a question dedicated to setting the root password, but I'd be happy with any wording that makes sure that people understand that both options are totally fine. The other thing that I was trying to ensure is that people are reassured that they'll get to specify a password that will get them root access even if they decide to leave the root password unset. This is because I've seen people become quite uncertain about what to expect at this point in the install. I've found that it is not easy to come up with things that include much nuance about this, while still fitting in the space available, which is why I decided to try a more opinionated approach. One could soften what I wrote by replacing "generally recommended" with something like "often appropriate" -- how does that seem to people? One can of course tinker with this stuff indefinitely. I actually spent a fair amount of time wondering how best to describe not setting a root password for instance -- should one say "leave the password unset", "set an empty password", "enter no password", or something like "just hit <RETURN>"? (and does that last one actually apply to all the available UIs?). The same goes for how you say that the password is not going to get shown (unless you ask for it to be shown), which in the GTK UI gets characters replaced with dots, IIRC in the text UI its with asterisks, and I'd guess it just gets completely hidden in the speech install. Cheers, Phil. -- Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
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