Bug#1083102: trixie: last and lastlog are gone

[Chris Hofstaedtler <zeha@debian.org>]

Package: release-notes
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: util-linux@packages.debian.org

Hi,

util-linux used to ship three vaguely related programs: last, lastb, and
lastlog. In trixie, they are gone.

The fileformat and the programs are not Year-2038 safe, and the
involved upstreams do not want to fix the file formats.

For last(1), SuSE developed "wtmpdb" as a replacement. To make this
work, the wtmpdb and libpam-wtmpdb packages need to be installed.

For lastlog(8), the replacement is lastlog2. To make this work, the
lastlog2 and libpam-lastlog2 packages need to be installed.

For both replacements, the PAM library brings a configuration snippet
that needs to be accepted by the local admin, if necessary by running
pam-auth-update. There is a Recommends: relationship from
wtmpdb/lastlog2 to libpam-wtmpdb/lastlog2, to make installing easier,
but clearly not all users use Recommends.
util-linux does *not* directly depend on the replacements, to avoid
increasing the Essential package set.

util-linux briefly documents this in NEWS.Debian, but given the amount
of bug reports util-linux already(!) gets about last missing, this
really needs to be in the release-notes.

Please consider having some prominent warning in the release notes for
trixie.

Many thanks,
Chris