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[Gayan Weerakutti <reversiblean@xxxxxxxx>]

** Changed in: shadow (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Gayan Weerakutti (reversiblean)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/590300

Title:
  RIdiculously misleading error message from passwd

Status in shadow package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  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.

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