Package: release-notes Severity: normal X-Debbugs-Cc: util-li...@packages.debian.org
Hi, util-linux used to ship three vaguely related programs: last, lastb, and lastlog. In trixie, they are gone. The fileformat and the programs are not Year-2038 safe, and the involved upstreams do not want to fix the file formats. For last(1), SuSE developed "wtmpdb" as a replacement. To make this work, the wtmpdb and libpam-wtmpdb packages need to be installed. For lastlog(8), the replacement is lastlog2. To make this work, the lastlog2 and libpam-lastlog2 packages need to be installed. For both replacements, the PAM library brings a configuration snippet that needs to be accepted by the local admin, if necessary by running pam-auth-update. There is a Recommends: relationship from wtmpdb/lastlog2 to libpam-wtmpdb/lastlog2, to make installing easier, but clearly not all users use Recommends. util-linux does *not* directly depend on the replacements, to avoid increasing the Essential package set. util-linux briefly documents this in NEWS.Debian, but given the amount of bug reports util-linux already(!) gets about last missing, this really needs to be in the release-notes. Please consider having some prominent warning in the release notes for trixie. Many thanks, Chris
