[systemd-devel] [PATCH] TODO: add various journal enhancements

[Josh Triplett]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:42:38AM +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:28 AM, Josh Triplett <josh at joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:12:38AM +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> >> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Josh Triplett <josh at joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> >> > +  - Provide one or more FUSE filesystems:
> >> > +    - Emulate utmp, wtmp, btmp, lastlog; read/write, recording credentials for all writes rather than limiting permissions
> >>
> >> That sounds like overkill. We should surely externalize the creation
> >> of the files from systemd and make it optional to support legacy
> >> stuff, otherwise these files should rather be phased out, than
> >> emulated, I think.
> >
> > Separate, external, and optional, definitely; no sense running it if you
> > have no tools around that read or write the format directly.  But given
> > that the glibc API (and corresponding expectations about the file
> > format) will exist forever, it seems sensible to have a way to support
> > that without actually having the files on the filesystem.
> 
> I don't know what *forever* means here, I kind of doubt that. It's
> pure legacy stuff that needs that, and that works with current
> systemd. Most systems out there should not need these silly files at
> all, and the use will surely not grow in the future.

Every terminal emulator, display manager, screen/tmux/etc program, or
other program that needs to embed an interactive shell should log to
utmp and family.  The glibc API represents the standard way to do so.
So either the glibc API needs to directly support logging to (and
reading from) journald, or some compatibility shim like this needs to
exist.

- Josh Triplett