Re: bug#64937: "who" reports funny dates

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-08-06 14:10, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 06, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
> > On 2023-08-06 13:00, Paul Eggert wrote:
> >
> > > How does "last" emulate /var/log/wtmp using systemd?
> >
> > Oh, I see from <https://github.com/thkukuk/wtmpdb> that wtmpdb comes
> > with its own "last". Is the plan to migrate this code into util-linux
> > "last", or simply to kill off util-linux "last"?  Similarly for
> > util-linux utmpdmp,  procps "w", etc.
>
> util-linux will merge lastlog2, I have no idea about wtmpdb, this wasn't
> a topic yet before my vacation.

Does lastlog2 store only the last login of each user? If so, it won't 
work for a command like "last eggert", which outputs all the times that 
I've logged in since wtmp was rotated.


> procps-ng kills reading files directly and will use systemd, patch got
> accepted but not yet merged.
> The current patches for util-linux do the same.
> I haven't looked at the latest PR for shadow, but they planned the same.
>
> So nobody seems to care about "backward compatibily" with a time
> where tools like "last" did not yet exist.

Hmm, well I guess I care. (Call me an old-timer. :-) Admittedly I care 
more about usage like "last eggert".


> > Also, the question about /var/adm/btmp remains.
>
> Is there a use-case, for which it is __reliable__ useable?

I don't know what you mean by __reliable__. Certainly there are commands 
that use /var/adm/btmp. util-linux's "lastb" command uses it, for 
example. Will lastb stop working?


> Until now, nobody could tell me one and nobody cared.

Perhaps you're not talking to the right people? I can find a reasonable 
amount of discussion about this stuff. For example, even if we restrict 
our attention to btmp, a Google search using the query "lastb btmp" 
returned 68,200 results for me just now, with many results on 
serverfault.com, stackexchange.com, linuxhint.com, etc.