I suppose this is intended to be this way.  Jiri?

IIRC we had this discussion on and off for several years. We try to be on the 
safe side to avoid unpleasant side effects - e.g., using the /etc/shadow 
delimiter character ":" or characters that might do unexpected things. All the 
above quote characters and "<" / ">" are asking for trouble IMHO - just think 
of all the things that can happen if they are passed to shell commands, which 
they ultimately will by YaST2. 
 
No, that really is intentional. 

I understand that for usernames. But for passwords its unreasonable. You never
pass that character to a shell script and its never stored in clear text in any
file (except something is really wrong). Remember im talking about the password,
not the username/groupname or whatever...

Thorsten, what do you think?

I don't know how YaST2 handles this passwords, so I cannot say if the
problems from #2 are true for YaST2 or not. All other programs I know of
don't have this problems with "<" or ">".

But the comment about ":" is wrong, since you don't write cleartext passwords
into /etc/shadow and the symbols for crypt passwords are "clean" in that way.

OK, I'll allow them for 10.0; however I won't change the text saying which
characters can be included in password, because we've already passed text freeze.

done (will be in beta4)

later is now

label also fixed

*** Bug 144060 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***