Unity greeter password field uses old-fashioned asterisks

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Problem occurs with: unity-greeter 0.0.5-0ubuntu2, Ubuntu Ocelot
Does not occur with: Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, XChat, or pretty much anything else

1. Type your password.

What you see: Asterisks. ******
What you should see: Bullets. ••••••

Modern password fields use bullets to minimize the risk that you may get worried that the characters appearing are the characters you actually typed. For example, if your password starts with the number 8 or a capital U.

[Sam_ (and-sam)]

Before the update, with 0.0.2-0ubuntu3, the pw field displayed bullets.
After recent update to 0.0.5-0ubuntu3 it displays asterisks.

unity-greeter:
  Installed: 0.0.5-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 0.0.5-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 0.0.5-0ubuntu3 0

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Setting to Incomplete, waiting for Design input whether this change is intentional.

But as the original report says, this change is inconsistent with everything else in Ubuntu that I've seen.

[Mika Meskanen (mika)]

I think asterisks were used instead of bullets for aesthetic reasons – i.e. to leverage the delicacy of the Ubuntu font. However, if that strongly conflicts with an established pattern and is inconsistent with anything else, we can revert to bullets for sure.

[Greg Michalec (greg-primate)]

Most other password dialogs I've seen in Ubuntu - 'lock screen' login, network passwords, passwords for empathy, even password dialogs in firefox - all use bullets. When I saw the asterisks used for the lightdm login, my immediate impression was the something was not hooked up correctly, i.e. it immediately seemed inconsistent. So, my $.02 is to revert to bullets,.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

What's the final decision on this one? Bullets or asterisks?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Bullets, please.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package unity-greeter - 0.2.0-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-greeter (0.2.0-0ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
    - Improve scrolling animation (LP: #844050)
    - Select menubar when F10 is pressed
    - Fix Orca not starting when enabling screen reader (LP: #850554)
    - Add a keyboard indicator (LP: #783827, LP: #834487)
    - Always focus new windows
    - Check version of Vala when compiling
    - Update logo for 12.04 (LP: #892394)
    - Use default invisible character in password dialog (LP: #834878)
    - Darken indicator bar
    - User smaller grid size
    - Put end-stops on user list scrolling
    - Only fade out user labels that can't fit in completely (LP: #883260)
    - Center dots (LP: #872800)
    - Add translator comments (LP: #855385)
    - Add option to disable dots (LP: #883908)
    - Only redraw parts of the screen that have changed
    - Don't run the greeter if can't connect to daemon and not in test mode
      (LP: #876754)
 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:56:21 +1100