Kai Krakow posted on Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:14:19 +0100 as excerpted: > Am Di., 10. März 2026 um 23:42 Uhr schrieb Duncan > <[email protected]>: >> >> Then there's the gentoo dev, floppym as it happens, that recently >> helped me spot a 20+ year latent local config bug that ultimately >> traced to the way I migrated users from Mandrake when I became a >> Gentooer back in 2004! > > Welcome to the club, I migrated from OpenSuSE back in around 2007. > >> [...] but it all clicked into place when he >> mentioned the human user vs. system user config in /etc/login.defs and >> wondered if my human user UID might somehow be configured as a system >> user, and I recalled worrying about effects some 20 years earlier in >> that migration, effects that didn't actually trigger for 20 years! > > Funny, this sound *a lot* like what I reported here: > https://bugs.gentoo.org/970487
Definitely the same config-bug root, for the same base reason, but our systems expressed it in evident-bugs differently. I've looked at steve and the job-server thing that your bug started with, but for $reasons decided not to try it at this time. So I didn't see that one. While I'm guessing you use GUI logins (CLI vs GUI logins being the actually documented aspect of things that had me so thoroughly spun in the wrong direction as I /knew/ that one applied to me; I just didn't know how to fix it without simply accepting defeat and going full GUI login) and thus bypassed what I saw with CLI-logins and starting my (plasma) sessions from there. Meanwhile, making explicit the previously implicit: Mike Gilbert uses floppym as his email handle. FWIW my bug (with that as a side discussion) is https://bugs.gentoo.org/968425 if anyone's interested in comparison, timing, etc. Seems he had raised the possibility and I had theory- confirmed the login.defs connection several weeks before on Jan 8, but other things took me away for a bit and I only deployed-fix-confirmed it on Feb 24, three days before your Feb 27 discovery of the login.defs connection on your system and his posting of those see-alsos late that same day (UTC). > Thanks for reporting this - so I'm not the only running hitting strange > old bugs I probably introduced myself like 20 years ago... :-D At least you spotted it yourself. Something I couldn't do and worse yet was so completely lost by the CLI-login false lead, it could literally have been another 20 years before I figured it out, had I been left to my own devices. That's... humbling! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
