Bug 1466993

Summary:	gnome-terminal (or vte) doesn't work with who or write to specific pts
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Trevor Cordes <trevor>
Component:	gnome-terminal	Assignee:	Matthias Clasen <mclasen>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	24	CC:	debarshir, egmont, f2404, lantw44, mclasen
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Last Closed:	2017-07-03 13:20:50 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description Trevor Cordes 2017-07-01 09:42:52 UTC

Description of problem:
Something changed in gnome-terminal or vte last year (I think) and write between specific pts's stopped working: i.e. write trevor pts/44
write: trevor is not logged in on pts/9

Also, "who" doesn't show any gnome-terminal pts, it doesn't show anything at all for g-t, not even 1 entry for gnome-terminal.  This is less important for me but might be indicative of the underlying problem.  If you open xterms instead, they all show up in who, one entry per pts, which is what you'd expect.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
gnome-terminal-3.20.3-1.fc24.x86_64
vte-0.28.2-17.fc24.x86_64


How reproducible:
always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. open 1 gnome-terminals (or 2 if you want a realistic example)
2. run "tty"
3. "write <your-login-name> <pts/XX-as-above>"


Actual results:
write: trevor is not logged in on pts/44


Expected results:
no error, can input text to write to the terminal


Additional info:
This worked for many many years (like 5-10+) up until I'm guessing last year (I didn't note the time because even though I use the feature a ton, I can work around it).

Comment 1 Christian Persch 2017-07-02 21:08:47 UTC

See also bug 1328947. In short, [uw]tmp/lastlog logging is not supported anymore by gnome-terminal, so this is WONTFIX at least as far as upstream is concerned.

Comment 2 Trevor Cordes 2017-07-02 22:48:24 UTC

<Face plant>
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747046

So they didn't realize that code is what allowed write to work (and probably many other things that no one has thought of yet).  Ya, good "win" taking out 2200 lines of code they don't understand/like "just because".

So now write is broken in Fedora with gnome-terminal.  Should I file a bug against write?

But it gets worse: I can understand the super-specific write trevor pts/9 not working, but also just "write trevor" does not work when only gnome-terminals are open:

>write trevor
write: trevor has messages disabled

>mesg
is y

???  That's broken.  Open just one xterm and then you can write once again (no "has messages disabled" error) but the write only shows up on the xterm (not in any g-t's).

Argh... even worse: "wall" gives no error and writes no output to any gnome-terminal!  So you think you've walled something when in fact you've communicated to no one.  So much for notifying users of impending reboots.

Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this manner?

Is there any workaround I can use to write text to these pts without using "write" now that g-t devs have unilaterally decided the age-old extremely useful write/wall tools are unimportant?

Comment 3 Debarshi Ray 2017-07-03 13:20:50 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1280724 ***

Comment 4 Debarshi Ray 2017-07-03 13:31:07 UTC

(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2)
> Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this
> manner?

Konsole?

Comment 5 Trevor Cordes 2017-07-05 05:27:41 UTC

Nope, Konsole functions completely sanely with regard to write/who/wall.  Looks like only gnome-terminal has gone down the path of insanity.
https://muug.ca/pipermail/roundtable/2017-July/005010.html

In fact, it looks like Konsole will make a fine replacement for g-t.

Comment 6 Igor 2017-07-11 17:06:48 UTC

(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2)
> Is there any workaround I can use to write text to these pts without using
> "write" now that g-t devs have unilaterally decided the age-old extremely
> useful write/wall tools are unimportant?

It seems you can `echo "test" > /dev/pts/44`

Comment 7 Egmont Koblinger 2017-07-20 21:57:47 UTC

(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2)

> Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this
> manner?

E.g. terminology (enlightenment) and st (suckless) have no utmp logging at all.