XFCE terminal + utempter

[Daniel O'Connor]

> On 20 Apr 2021, at 17:14, Guido Falsi <mad at madpilot.net> wrote:
> On 20/04/21 04:56, Daniel O'Connor via freebsd-xfce wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I had to recompile xfce4-terminal for a client because they weren't getting UPS notifications (via wall) - I had to add '--with-utempter' to 'CONFIGURE_ARGS'.
> 
> While I understand the need this looks like an ancient way of doing such things. Also if I have ten terminal windows open I'd get ten notifications?

Yep, it's pretty old school.

Personally I don't understand why the client wants it either since if you are logged in locally you can *hear* the UPS beep, however..

For what it's worth xterm, tmux and SSHing in write utmp entries. This means all those terminals get notifications (although you can suppress them with 'mesg n').

>> This system is a bit old but it seems the current port does not have that flag either (although I am not sure if perhaps it would be auto detected in the latest ports).
>> If it isn't picked up, can the flag be added to the port? With that done it because a user configuration item (defaults to off though it seems).
> 
> It is not automatically detected. Upstream has the flag off by default and the port is simply leaving it there.

OK.

> Just looking at the xfce4-terminal configure file I'm not sure how you got it working though, since the configure file does not look for the correct library on FreeBSD. ( at least according to utempter_add_record(3) )

Yes, I was a bit confused about that too, however it works in practise.

> Please notice I am not an expert on utmp/wtmp/utmpx and such so I'm not sure of the implications right away, I need research to get a clear understanding.
> 
> Anyway I can do some testing, but I'd rather avoid any default behaviour changes, so I'd evaluate adding this as an option turned off by default.

Even if it is compiled in it is still off until the user enables in the preferences window.

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum