Bug#869617: libutempter0: Helper executable multiply broken: can't add, can't del
Package: libutempter0
Version: 1.1.6-4
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
Hi there,
I've been looking at trying to use libutempter0 to cope with the fact
that since stretch, gnome-terminal no longer even touches utmp. This
has been a little bumpier than anticipated, as utempter_add_record
returns without error even though it fails. This appears to be down to
the helper program, /usr/lib/../utempter, failing, and add_record then
ignoring that fail. If you run utempter manually you get a failure exit
status when trying to add (which utempter_add_record then ignores).
The problem seems to be utempter.c's use of ptsname() to get the device
name: this call fails. On advice from Christian Persch on the
gnome-terminal team I tried replacing this call with ttyname(): utempter
seems to behave correctly after making this change, and indeed my
workaround for gnome-terminal then seems to work.
So it'd be great to see a patch to this to replace the
ptsname(STDIN_FILENO) call in utempter.c with a call to
ttyname(STDIN_FILENO).
Might also be worth patching the utempter library functions so that they
fail if execution of utempter fails.
Regards,
Conrad
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages libutempter0 depends on:
ii libc6 2.24-11+deb9u1
libutempter0 recommends no packages.
libutempter0 suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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