Re: Advice needed: updating whowatch 1.4 → 1.8.6 on FreeBSD (wtmp/utmpx issues)

On 09/01/2026 12:05, Jishan Alam wrote:

> Thank you for preparing and sharing the port patch. I’ve reviewed it 
> locally and can confirm that it builds and runs as expected. However, 
> since the upstream code is still unstable, I’d prefer to hold off on 
> committing it for now.

Yes, I agree, I did it just to be able to build it on our build machine. 
It is not meant to be pushed to the ports tree now.

>  > Your fixed version of whowatch runs, but it has different UI from the
>  > old version 1.4, and the older version had colors for characters used
>  > for tree branches. As I understand, it has nothing to do with your utmpx
>  > fix, it was probably made by original author.
> 
> That matches my understanding as well. I haven’t used whowatch prior to 
> working on this update, so I don’t have historical context for the UI 
> changes beyond what’s present in the upstream code.

If you are interested I have access to one old machine with working 
whowatch 1.4 so I can make a few screenshots with the old UI and send it 
to you privately. I think there are a few details which were nicer in 
the old version.

>  > One issue I found is that on one machine it does not display process
>  > [o]wner info, it shows -1 instead. I don't know why. On the other
>  > machine it shows the correct owner info. Botch machines are 14.3 amd64.
>  > On botch machines I tried to run it as normal user and as root.
> 
> Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll take a closer look at how the owner 
> information is parsed and will follow up once I have a better 
> understanding of what’s causing the discrepancy.

Do you think you will be able to make [d]etails also working on FreeBSD?
[d]etails and [s]ysinfo is new to this version, they were not there in 
the version 1.4. But there was [c]md which turns On / Off showing long 
command line options of the running processes or process name only. So 
for shell scripts you see just "sh" or "/home/user/bin/myscript.sh -t -b 
my-arg"

> In parallel, I’ve been making progress on the sysinfo issue. It turns 
> out the existing implementation is largely Linux-specific, relying on / 
> proc/*, which doesn’t translate well to FreeBSD. To address this, I’m 
> redesigning the sysinfo layer to be more OS-neutral by introducing 
> abstract interfaces with OS-specific implementations. On Linux this will 
> continue to use /proc, while on FreeBSD it will rely on the sysctl API.
> 
> I’ve pushed the latest changes to my branch and will continue working 
> through the remaining sysinfo components. It’s a fairly broad change, 
> but now that the structure is in place, the rest should be straightforward.

I really appreciate your work on this!

Best regards
Miroslav Lachman