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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 01:08:15 -0800

On 2025-02-17 00:22, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> Maybe that systemd version is too old on that systems?

The systemd versions are reasonably recent. Fedora 41 has systemd 256.11 
(2025-01-08) and Ubuntu 24.10 has systemd 256.5 (2024-08-31). Here are 
the details:

On Fedora 41, "systemctl --version" reports:

systemd 256 (256.11-1.fc41)
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX -APPARMOR +IMA +SMACK +SECCOMP -GCRYPT +GNUTLS 
+OPENSSL +ACL +BLKID +CURL +ELFUTILS +FIDO2 +IDN2 -IDN -IPTC +KMOD 
+LIBCRYPTSETUP +LIBCRYPTSETUP_PLUGINS +LIBFDISK +PCRE2 +PWQUALITY 
+P11KIT +QRENCODE +TPM2 +BZIP2 +LZ4 +XZ +ZLIB +ZSTD +BPF_FRAMEWORK 
+XKBCOMMON +UTMP +SYSVINIT +LIBARCHIVE

On Ubuntu 24.10, the same command reports:

systemd 256 (256.5-2ubuntu3.1)
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +APPARMOR +IMA +SMACK +SECCOMP +GCRYPT -GNUTLS 
+OPENSSL +ACL +BLKID +CURL +ELFUTILS +FIDO2 +IDN2 -IDN +IPTC +KMOD 
+LIBCRYPTSETUP +LIBCRYPTSETUP_PLUGINS +LIBFDISK +PCRE2 +PWQUALITY 
+P11KIT +QRENCODE +TPM2 +BZIP2 +LZ4 +XZ +ZLIB +ZSTD +BPF_FRAMEWORK 
-XKBCOMMON +UTMP +SYSVINIT +LIBARCHIVE

> systemd  only writes the boot time, nothing else.

Is it that simple? systemd/src/core/exec-invoke.c's exec_invoke seems to 
do more than that if ENABLE_UTMP is defined.

Even if it's that simple, something is updating the traditional 
/var/run/utmp and /var/log/wtmp files on Fedora and Ubuntu and at least 
in some cases they work better than systemd does and this should be 
fixed somehow.