Just like bin/ and sbin/, I think setting WARNS to the highest value
possible will make it more attractive for people to fix warnings.
- The WARNS variable is set in the Makefile in the directory of the
application itself, making it more likely that it will be removed out
of curiosity to see what happens.
- New applications will most likely build with WARNS=6 out of the box,
because the author would more likely fix the warnings during
development than lower WARNS.
Unfortunately almost all apps in libexec require a lowered value of
WARNS.
One of the things I really want to do, is to get rid of the limitations
of our current utmp(5) mechanism:
- It only allows 8 byte TTY device names.
- The hostname only allows 16 bytes of storage.
I'm not a big fan of <utmpx.h>, but I think we should at least try to
add parts of it. Unfortunately we cannot implement <utmpx.h>, because we
miss various fields, such as ut_id, ut_pid, etc. The API provided by
libulog shares some similarities with <utmpx.h>, so it shouldn't be too
hard to port these applications eventually. In most simple cases, it
should just be a matter of removing the ulog_ prefix everywhere.
As a bonus, it also implements a function called ulog_login_pseudo(),
which allows unprivileged applications to write log entries, provided
they have a valid file descriptor to a pseudo-terminal master device.
libulog will allow a smoother transition to a new file format by adding
a library interface to deal with utmp/wtmp/lastlog files. I initially
thought about adding the functionality to libutil, but because I'm not
planning on keeping this library around forever, we'd better keep it
separated.
Next items on the todo list:
1. Port applications in the base system (and ports) to libulog, instead
of letting them use <utmp.h>.
2. Remove <utmp.h>, implement <utmpx.h> and reimplement this library on
top.
3. Port as many applications as possible back to <utmpx.h>.
