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Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2013 18:23:52 -0500
From: Diane Bruce <db@db.net>
To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject: group(5) Group Passwords do not work
Message-ID: <20130207232352.GA51387@night.db.net>
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Hi,

I've been looking at pw & friends for a while when this PR
was brought to my attention.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=docs/167741

Right now group passwords in /etc/group are marked with *
I'm told some linux distributions are marking this as "NOTUSED" 
Clearly our man pages should either be changed to make it much more clear
that this stuff does not work and will never work in FreeBSD or the
code should be changed to make it work. ;) Mark Saad spent some time
checking this. If it is stated it is never going to be made to work, by core
or whatever, some of the code in libutil + pw can be simplified a bit.
It was also suggested on IRC that it is also possible that some pam
code does expect group passwords to work or at least passed through.

How are we to proceed folks?

- Diane
-- 
- db@FreeBSD.org db@db.net http://www.db.net/~db