[PATCH 3/3] login: Make user accounting database no-op

[Thorsten Kukuk]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 8:39 PM Adhemerval Zanella Netto
<adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 07/08/24 14:27, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 5:23 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 2024-08-07 02:20, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> >>> At SUSE/openSUSE all new products don't have /run/utmp nor
> >>> /var/log/wtmp anymore. But applications checking return code of the
> >>> utmp/wtmp functions report an error, if this files don't exist.
> >>
> >> Do Gnulib-using programs have this problem? For example, does GNU
> >> coreutils 9.5 work correctly without SUSE needing to patch it?
> >
> > I  haven't seen any problems with Gnulib based programs, coreutils has
> > no open issues and I don't see any patches in this area.
> > sshd is for example an application which creates a lot of messages
> > around utmp/wtmp.
> >
>
> It still on my plan to rebase this patch and try to move forwards with
> this approach.  On 2.40 we changed the way utmp/utmpx to handle the
> seconds-since-epoch types as unsigned 32-bit type
> (commit 5361ad3910c257bc327567be76fde532ed238e42); so at least it is
> not a y2038 issue anymore.

How should that solve the Y2038 issue?
I'm not aware of any application which interprets the int32 time value
as unsigned value. And since this interpretation is done in the
application and not inside glibc, you need to touch every single line
of code handling utmp entries.
With how many projects did you already spoke that they adjust their code?
And how do applications find out, if the value was written as int or as uint?

For me this is not a solution for the Y2038, that issue still exists.

  Thorsten

> It still does not solve other bad designs from the API and/or
> implementation (like BZ #24492); but this also does not seem to be
> an urgent issue for other distros like Fedora.



-- 
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)