On Fri, Apr 04, 2025 at 12:46:03AM +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
But the thing that needs looking at is why who in Debian behaves like it does, and if it doesn't work right, fix that in who or wherever else it needs fixing in the stack.
Because I haven't turned it on, because I'm really unhappy about the complete lack of a transition plan.
Reintroducing utmp will just hide the problem, and we'll be in the same situation when releasing forky, or forky+1, ...
No we won't, if we publish a deprecation note, make both formats available, and make it possible to turn off utmp. Ideally who would have a flag that lets a user choose an implementation and compare the output, to make it easier to identify discrepencies. It could use utmp if available and query systemd if not, if no specific option is chosen.
PS: I never understood why there's both w and who, and why they are different implementations.
who is a posix standard utility for listing logged-in users, w is a mashup of uptime and finger that gives more of a system overview (from the perspective of what you'd want to know about a system 40 years ago).
