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

From: Erik Auerswald <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:40:21 +0200

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 02:13:37PM -0600, 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.

Logins via X used to update it as well (seldomly used nowadays). The local
desktop session usually updates utmp as well, at least with XFCE on
Debian/testing this is still the case. GNOME Terminal updates utmp as well.
Screen updates it, too. When I last looked at it, Konsole (from KDE) did
not update utmp.

> AFAIK it doesn't have anything to do with Debian changing anything.

Sven Joachim wrote:
> 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)

Linda A. Walsh noticed a similar thing:
> The same thing happens on openSuSE

Of course this is most likely caused by changes outside of coreutils. On a
"desktop" system without any terminal windows, the desktop session should
be shown in the "who" output. On all systems I could easily check that is
the case. I do not have any SystemD/GNOME or KDE systems to test.

Thanks,
Erik