Subject: bug#73928: Bug#1080330: coreutils: who no longer works

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2025 14:52:07 -0800

At this point I confess I don't know what changes would be needed for 
GNU 'who'. I see a difference of opinion as to whether 'w' works. There 
seem to be multiple mechanisms in play (utmp, wtmp, wtmpdb, lastlog2, 
logind, maybe others?) and I don't know when to use which, or even how 
to use them except for the traditional utmp/wtmp files.

Perhaps whoever has changed the longstanding API (is that Thorsten 
Kukuk, or someone else? anyway I'll cc Thorsten) can chime in with a 
proposed patch to bleeding-edge GNU coreutils. This would probably mean 
a patch to Gnulib's readutmp module, which already is supposed to work 
with systemd's new utmp interfaces but I guess some people are reporting 
problems with it? (This is unclear.)

For what it's worth, I briefly looked at 
<https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE%3AFactory/coreutils> 
and didn't see a patch there.  So perhaps the problem is already 
addressed in bleeding-edge Coreutils?

Without some actionable advice from experts in this area, I don't see 
this portability issue being fixed any time soon.

For now, I've merged the following GNU Coreutils bug reports as they all 
seem to be the same topic.

https://bugs.gnu.org/73928
https://bugs.gnu.org/76346
https://bugs.gnu.org/76347