Bug#1125682: xterm sessions do not appear in loginctl output

On Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 04:43:25AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2026-02-03 20:32:56 -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 12:19:04AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > > Package: xterm
> > > Version: 406-1
> > > Severity: normal
> > 
> > perhaps wishlist.
> 
> No, as since the removal of utmp, this is now a required feature, as
> said by Chris Hofstaedtler.

I forget who's Chris - some generally acknowledged authority on software
requirements?  If so, you should mention the allusion by their role.

(wishlist, none the less - we've been here before too many times)

> > In a quick check, "xterm -ls" does run a "login" shell, but systemd
> > doesn't know about that (something to investigate).
> 
> This should be independent from whether the shell is a login shell,
> anyway ("logind" is probably misnamed as the intent is to also
> handle the terminal sessions).

I don't see another route to getting the data into systemd's cache.

(its documentation is poor, but you may have something specific in mind)

I didn't notice this initially, but reviewing the (xterm) source see
that a failure to write utmp might interfere with running login.

That's something that I could improve, since fixing systemd is out of scope.
 
> > strace reminds me that xterm isn't able to write to utmp since that's
> > been removed.  If it hadn't been removed, (again looking at strace),
> > "who" and "w" would see that information in addition to what it gets
> > via systemd's intentionally undocumented sessions data.
> 
> "who" is unfortunately underspecified. "w -t" sees all the
> terminal sessions (but it does not use systemd for that, and
> in theory, the -t option should not be needed).

"who" doesn't set the data.  It reads it.  This bug report deals with
writing the data.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <[email protected]>
https://invisible-island.net

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