Hello,

On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 6:07 AM Miroslav Lachman <[email protected]> wrote:

> I made a quick update for port, if anybody what to test it from the
> ports tree, see attached patch. If you apply it, remove "files" subdir
> before running "make".

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.

> 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.

> 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.


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.

Repository branch:
https://github.com/Zedai00/whowatch/tree/freebsd-utmpx-experiment

-- 
Best Regards,
Jishan Alam

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