bug#64937: "who" reports funny dates

[Thorsten Kukuk]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 04, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Thanks for doing all that work. I looked into it, and found a problem: a 
> command like "who /var/log/wtmp" stops working because the systemd 
> emulation of read_utmp only supports plain "who" (rougnly equivalent to 
> "who /var/run/utmp" on Fedora). So I installed it into coreutils, but 
> the default is systemd is disabled. This should give people time to 
> experiment with it.
> 
> Thorsten, is there some way to get the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp with 
> systemd?

systemd does not collect wtmp data, because the applications don't 
report this data to systemd. And I don't think it makes sense to 
implement that or that such patches would be accepted by systemd
developers.

wtmp uses the same struct as utmp and thus faces the same problems,
including the Y2038 issue.
For this reason we (openSUSE/SUSE) switched to wtmpdb:
https://github.com/thkukuk/wtmpdb and don't support /var/log/wtmp
anymore.

And yes, "who /var/log/wtmp" will not work with this, too. But is this
really a required or usefull use case?
/usr/bin/last can give you the same output.

  Thorsten

-- 
Thorsten Kukuk, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Future Technologies
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, 90461 Nuernberg, 
Germany
Managing Director: Ivo Totev, Andrew McDonald, Werner Knoblich
(HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)