utmpx on OpenBSD.

Amar Takhar verm at darkbeer.org
Sat Feb 6 13:34:40 UTC 2016


On 2016-02-05 21:30 -0800, Hal Murray wrote:
> 
> I took a quick look.  It won't be hard to put that stuff back, but it's 
> typical of the sort of code that Eric ripped out for good reasons.

If we had known OpenBSD was going to be tossed out with it we would have kept it 
-- you're right it was removed for good reasons.


> But do we want to go there?  Is that a slippery slope?

It's not, we need to support OpenBSD there is no way out of it.  


> We could easily and cleanly bypass the code that uses utmpx.  That would 
> screwup accounting if time stepped by more than a second.
> 
> Just curious, does anybody use accounting these days?  If so, are they 
> running OpenBSD?

No idea but I do not favour the idea of removing features to avoid adding 
workarounds.  That's worse than adding utmp support back in.  I think it's a 
reasonable solution for 

If it was more than touching a single file and adding a couple of ifdefs it 
would be a strong argument but for this case it's better to add it back in.


> utmpx is part of POSIX.  I didn't find a good reason why OpenBSD doesn't 
> support it.
> 
> I did find one "strong +1" comment for not supporting non-posix workarounds.

I will email some of the threads privately.


Amar.


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