On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, Thomas Dickey wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jan 2011, Jeffrey Sheinberg wrote:This is a bug in xterm Version: 261-1 as I originally reported, please see my above comments.I can reproduce this difference without the utempter library (though it's possible that the problem is related to ifdef's for it). I'll look for a solution and close out #268 "soon" (have been busy setting up new development machines).
hmm - my quick check "without" was also without setgid, so there was no utmp entry.Reading the source for login, I see that the error message comes from a check (a) not running as root and (b) no valid utmp entry found.
Given that, the likely explanation is that login is dropping the setuid itself. I don't see that in the unpatched source, but see comments in the Debian patch which indicate that's intended behavior.
Looks like a possible workaround would be to use sudo or other wrapper that holds the setuid behavior.
-- Thomas E. Dickey http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net