Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 174765
regression in ssh-add window formatting
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:18 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051118 Fedora/1.5-0.5.0.rc3 Firefox/1.5 Description of problem: When you run say `ssh-add < /dev/null' with DISPLAY set (the idea is that it opens a window to prompt for the key passphrase, instead of using the terminal), the spot in which you enter your password on the left is very small compared with what appears to be a randomized progress bar that moves around as you enter the passphrase. I understand this is probably intentional, as a means to not provide information about the passphrase length to anyone who might be looking at the screen, but it does look very confusing. After first it gave me the impression of a layout bug. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced this is not the case :-) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.run ssh-add < /dev/null Actual Results: Odd window shows up, user confused, not sure where to enter the passphrase :-) Expected Results: Something that looks less confusing, or some text explaining the idea behind hiding the passphrase length Additional info:
It is of course intentional and I don't think that even if it is confusing it makes much harm because you can simply try to enter the passphrase to the entry which is btw focused by default. If you have a better idea how to make it so passphrase length is not revealed please share it. I will add 'Passphrase length hidden intentionally' text to the progress bar for now.
I found it *extremely* confusing; I don't think I've ever seen a dialog box where I'm supposed to enter a multi-character value into a one-character-wide box. You could maybe create a normal-sized entry field for the passphrase, and just not echo anything when the user types into it? That might be confusing too, but less than the current set-up. I spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to type my passphrase into the scrollbar. :)
Hopefully the situation is now improved with the added text.
Looks much better, indeed. Thanks!