I think it's wrong that passwords always show as 5 asterisks in the User Manager. After all, it's only root that has access to view it, and even more root can also change the password, so it wouldn't be a security issue. Instead one might wonder if the password stored doesn't correspond with what you thought it would be.
I'm not opposed to changing the behavior if there is a better way. What would you like the behavior to be?
Well I though it would be neat to show as many asterisks as there are letters int the password.
Well, I can't do that. I'd like to, but I don't think there's a way. Since most systems use shadow passwords, root can't tell what a user's password is. Root can change a user's password, but root doesn't have a way to figure out what the user's current password is (or even how many characters are in the password.) I agree that the current behavior isn't great, but I'll do some thinking about how to change it for the better. It's too late to change it for the next release of RHL, though.
I see. What about changing the caption to say "New password:" or "Change password:" and leave the fields blank?. Or maybe even moving those fields to a popup window, so that you would have to press a button saying "Change password" in order to open the change password dialogue. But of course, that would make the procedure slightly more awkward. Having read that it's not so easy to do, I wouldn't mind if you dismissed this request.
I thought about adding a "Change Password" button, but like you said, it's a little awkward. Bringing up a popup window at that point would give you three open windows (the main window, the user properties window, and the change password window), and that seems a bit ugly. Like I said, the current way isn't great either, but it works. I'd hate to replace it with a new method that is awkward, only in a different way. I think I'll close this report now, but I will consider a better way to do this for future versions. Thanks for your report.