Subject: Re: bug#35341: Guix System installer does not set up passwords and profile directories

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:13:35 +0200

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I installed Guix System from a USB flash drive from the current git
> master.  The manual describes I should set up a password with passwd.
> I think the installer should automate this, so users do not need to
> know the passwd command.

I think it’d be nice if the installer would initialize the user
password, and also root’s password (which is empty by default).

The obvious approach would be to add a dialog box in the installer and
then set the ‘password’ field of each <user-account>, and also add a
<user-account> for root itself with the ‘password’ field set.

The problem with this approach is that password hashes would end
world-readable in the store, so we would need to add warnings asking
users to change passwords after logging in.  Not great.

Another option would be to have an activation snippet that runs when
booting the newly installed system: if would check for a flag or
something (it could check for uninitialized passwords), and if it
determines it’s a first boot, open a dialog box asking for passwords.
We’d need to add a “post-install” service in the OS config that would do
just that.

That would be the most robust approach, but it’s also a bit more work I
guess.  It’s also not so nice that users will see this extra service in
their config.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.