Hello everyone, I just made various commits to FreeBSD HEAD to remove our old user accounting database interface (see utmp(5)) and replace it by the POSIX standardized utmpx interface (see getutxent(3)). This means we just got rid of some annoyances that are as old as the FreeBSD project itself: - Hostnames were originally restricted to 16 bytes, which is way too short for your average hostname generated by your ISP, but also for IPv6 addresses, which are at most 32 + 7 = 39 characters. - No support for login sessions not related to TTYs, like ppp(8), ftpd(8) sessions. - No support for multiple login sessions on one TTY, for example generated by login(1). I was not able to give us a smooth transition from utmp towards utmpx, simply because our utmp implementation offered almost no utility functions, which means all consumers modify the database files themselves. This means you should probably recompile any applications you're interested in that uses the user accounting database. I realize this may be quite uncomfortable, but we can't always win. [ This information is mainly for port maintainers: ] I've noticed there is some breakage in ports, but it shouldn't be too serious. I've seen cases where an application includes <utmp.h>, even though it doesn't use anything provided by that header. In other cases they used fields like UT_NAMESIZE to derive the maximum user name length supported by the system, which is clearly not what this definition was intended for. I've incremented __FreeBSD_version to 900007 to identify the import of utmpx. In case a certain port breaks badly, let me know and I'm willing to take a look at it. Be sure to give it a try and report any issues. Thanks! -- Ed Schouten <ed_at_80386.nl> WWW: http://80386.nl/
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