ports/85349: New port: sysutils/pwgen2. A small, powerful, GPL'ed password generator

[Andrew Khlebutin]

The following reply was made to PR ports/85349; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Andrew Khlebutin <andrey at hm.perm.ru>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Cc:  
Subject: ports/85349: New port: sysutils/pwgen2. A small, powerful, GPL'ed password generator
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 21:44:24 +0600

 As  far  as  I  understood,  these  ports have the same roots. It only
 matters that sysutils/pwgen hasn't been updated for around six years.
 
 pwgen  from  sf.net  is  updated periodically, also it contains a good
 configure script which doesn't even needs to be patched.
 
 Changelog  shows  the  bugs  are being fixed and it has more features.
 
 e.g.:
 
 -y, --symbols
        Include at least one special character in the password.
 
 -B, --ambiguous
        Don't  use  characters  that  could be confused by the user when
        printed, such as 'l' and '1', or '0' or 'O'.  This  reduces  the
        number  of  possible passwords signficantly, and as such reduces
        the quality of the passwords.  It may be useful  for  users  who
        have bad vision, but in general use of this option is not recom-
        mended.
 
 -H, --sha1=/path/to/file[#seed]
        Will use the sha1's hash of given file and the optional seed  to
        create  password. It will allow you to compute the same password
        later, if you remember the file, seed, and pwgen's options used.
        ie: pwgen -H ~/your_favourite.mp3#your at email.com gives a list of
        possibles passwords for your pop3 account, and you can ask  this
        list again and again.
 
 That is what author thinks about that:
        This   version   of   pwgen    was    written    by    Theodore    Ts'o
        <tytso at alum.mit.edu>.   It is modelled after a program originally writ-
        ten by Brandon S. Allbery, and then later extensively modified by  Olaf
        Titz,   Jim  Lynch,  and  others.   It  was  rewritten  from scratch by
        Theodore Ts'o because the original program was somewhat of a hack,  and
        thus  hard to maintain, and because the licensing status of the program
        was unclear.
 
 Taking  all  of  that  into  consideration I cannot understand why the
 ports  contain  that  prehistoric  version  of pwgen, but not a recent
 sf.net's one.