Subject: bug#21349: who shows no users nowadays on Debian

From: Sven Joachim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 22:31:13 +0200

On 2015-08-26 22:13 +0200, Bob Proulx wrote:

> Erik Auerswald wrote:
>> This works on a current Debian/testing system (stable as well), so it might
>> be a recent Debian/Sid (unstable) issue. Perhaps you want to open a bug
>> report there?
>
> Updating utmp depends upon the terminal emulator.  XTerm updates it.
> Any XTerm user will be logged in utmp.  I use XTerms and all of my
> terminals log as a user in utmp.  But most other terminal emulators
> ignore utmp and don't log anything.  If they don't log it then there
> isn't anything 'who' can do about it.
>
> AFAIK it doesn't have anything to do with Debian changing anything.

It most probably has, the latest xterm version (319) only writes a utmp
entry if you start a login shell (i.e. use the -ls option).  That's
supposed to be a bug fix[1].

Cheers,
       Sven

1. https://bugs.debian.org/794201