On Sun, Jun 01, 2025 at 12:12:42PM +0000, internet2poi...@aim.com wrote:
> acct currently does not have any relationship with the new wtmpdb package,
> though, so the cronjob as shipped will never work and will send an error
> message every month.
>
> acct should have a Depends or at least a Recommends for wtmpdb or the cronjob
> should be removed, IMO.
A number of people have suggested this (pulling in wtmpdb) but that
wouldn't help. Removing the cron job would, although I don't think that
is necessary as we can fix it. Either way some documentation is required
as to the limitations of this package.
By my reckoning there are four main uses cases for this package. One of
them isn't going to be useful in trixie but the others are:
| Analysing | Forensic analysis |
| a running system | of another system |
-----------+------------------+-------------------+
login | Use case #1 | Use case #2 |
accounting | broken on trixie | |
with wtmp | | |
-----------+------------------+-------------------+
process | Use case #3 | Use case #4 |
accounting | | |
-----------+------------------+-------------------+
Use cases #1 and #2 rely on wtmp format files, so #1 is no use on trixie
but #2 is perfectly valid analysing an older system or a non-Debian
system. Both access utmp format files directly so having wtmpdb does not
help. To fix the #1 use case would require major upstream changes, it's
not just a quick hack, and I don't think this is likely to happen.
Use cases #3 and #4 remain valid.
The cron job relates to #1 but we can make it useful by making the
'last' invocation work.
What's really wrong with the 'last' invocation in the cron job? It's not
the lack of wtmpdb (although that is of course needed. Not necessarily
as a dependency though because it is a minor and optional feature of the
package), it's the use of '-f' to specify a specific file, which is of
course in the wrong format. We can fix this by using the default wtmpdb
database (just drop the '-f'). We can then properly interrogate the last
month's data with '-s'.
So let's fix the cron job, document the package's limitations under
trixie and keep it in the archive for use cases 2, 3 and 4! My proposed
patch does this.
