Created by ?luisfreitas

Extremely important topic for new Debian users. Let's make easy for them.

Hi,

I nominated this article for deletion for the following reasons.

Firstly, I feel it's far too verbose. It feels like it may have been written by an LLM. We are discussing what policy we should have about LLM-written content on the Wiki at the moment, and I think it's likely we will forbid it.

As a general principle, I don't think we should add material to the wiki which reproduces topics which are already covered in the official Debian documentation. (e.g. the FAQ, the Debian Reference). Have you read these? Do you think this article adds something that is missing from the official docs?

This is the fundamental issue for me, really. I think the right place for this is the Debian Reference.

"Gaining Root Access" assumes the user knows the root password, which depends on the system configuration, in particular, whether the user specified a root password or not during install. It would make more sense to link to a description on how to get root elsewhere (the official docs, or another wiki page if the official docs lack the description).

Under "Setting Password Expiry" you've written that admins should not force password expiry. In an earlier version of the article, you wrote the exact opposite (and another editor has removed it). What made you change your mind? This strongly suggests to me that this part of the article, at least, came from an LLM like chatgpt or similar.

I'm not sure that the wiki (or by extension the project) should take a view on this one way or the other. But since you've now written that it shouldn't be done, why do you continue to document how to do it?

The "Group Passwords" section includes calls to "passwd -g". The passwd command in Debian does not accept a -g switch. This further suggests that the article was LLM generated, or worse, copied from somewhere else without attribution.

"Restricting Root Access Post-Changes" makes the misleading claim that Debian does not restrict the root account. This is not true, and is partly dependent on choices in d-i (see above). There's then a reference to SSH which is out of context and misleading (Debian's ssh defaults to "?PermitRootLogin prohibit-password").

-- jmtd 2025-04-30 15:50:39

--- I also think this article (and other from the same author) can be removed, because it's not Debian specific but very general. That he describes a command that does not work in Debian (passwd -g) is a strong proof that here someone writes articles without checking its content.

Some of his articles can also be found at https://blog.digitalxs.ca/

Saying this article is 'extremly important .. for new Debian users' but then writing a very long article with many details does not fit.

-- ?mrfai 2025-04-30

I agree and i find too verbose as well. I was thinking about the uses i had with the subject of password management in the past and frequent user needs to this regard. But honestly, i'm a bit tired of reading some articles on this wiki, describing and justifying how they make the package for debian, missing the point of provinding proper documentation on the package itself. One good (or bad) example of this is PHP, i tried to make something out of it, trying not to hurt susceptibilities of the maintainers that wrote it, because it's ... Bad. And mrfai, since when the documentation needs to be just debian specific? And yes password subject is important to users and pros. I would like to agree with jmtd about the Debian Reference, but i can't. For the simple reason it feels outdated and organically is not well conceived and uncomfortable. I had hopes that we could do something more useful on a pratical level, more realistic and with faster access to relevant and frequently used information . Delete the article, but the gap (or hole) will still be there on the wiki. And to answer to jmtd, regarding to password expiry, i used it before, and i was thinking about the uses i got involved with. Pratical to me. Delete away. I will continue the documentation that i consider important on my private wiki.

Addendum: a big difference is that, now, when using google "debian how to change password", this article on debian wiki shows up as one of the top 10 results.

Did you use an LLM (e.g. ChatGPT) to write some or all of this article?

Did you copy any of the article from another source -- and if so, what is the copyright/license of that source? Thanks

­-- jmtd 2025-05-01 10:43:04

No, it was from our documentation at DigitalXS that we made on the past 12 years. And since I own it I can release as public domain. docs.digitalxs.ca

And thinking it through, this back and forth is not productive at all and i'm not used to this low productivity levels. What i wanted is to give back to debian since it gave us a lot. I'll release my wiki to the public, since we do not do business out of documentation, a lot of of which is quite generic but designed to reduce our support load.

But thank you, wish you the best.

-- LuisFreitas - from Canada