Public bug reported:
In Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS, I typed passwd to change my password and
accidentally typed the new password in response to the prompt for the
current password. Instead of saying "incorrect password" or something
equally reasonable, which would have caused me to smack my forehead and
do it right the next time, I got the insane response "passwd:
Authentication token manipulation error"! This caused me to go down a
rathole for fifteen minutes, reading many pages with many possible
reasons for this error, none of which were "you mistyped your original
password".
This is a real user-interface FAIL and is certainly a regression in
understandability. It's obviously been there for a while; 9.04 does
this, although I note that Hoary 5.04 (yes, I still have a machine that
old) says "passwd: Authentication failure" instead, which, while still
not exactly user-friendly, at least puts "authentication" and "failure"
-and nothing else- into the error to give people half a clue that maybe
they mistyped something. (It's still not an error message users should
see, compared to "incorrect password".) But the current error message
is so obfuscated ("token manipulation error"---wtf is -that-?) that it's
absolutely no help at all---either to a user trying to figure out what's
going on, -or- to Google, considering how many other scenarios cause it
to spit out that error message.
Yuck.
** Affects: shadow (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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RIdiculously misleading error message from passwd
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/590300
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