[gentoo-user] Registering X session when using startx

[Alessandro DE LAURENZIS]

Folks,

This is philosophical rather than practical, but I'm struggling with it
and I would appreciate your view.

I normally use startx for logging in X, because that gives me enough
flexibility (much more than XDM, 'cause I can open as much servers as
needed *when* they are actually needed) not requiring, at the same
time, the use of *kit stuff (on my primary laptop I use CDM
- https://github.com/ghost1227/cdm - but it doesn't really matter).

Of course, X sessions are not logged into the utmp/wtmp DBs like it
happens using XDM.

Even if I could live without that, I would prefer to avoid any
inconsistencies and, of course, who/w/last commands could be useful for
multi-user systems administration.

So I'm trying to recover their functionality.

XDM has its own mechanism in /etc/X11/xdm/{Xstartup,Xreset} to log the
details using sessreg, but since startx is run as normal user, it isn't
reusable within my scope.

There are a very few info on the matter (see e.g.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=466104, closed as
WONTFIX) so it seems I'm alone...

I tried a bunch of WAs in order to be able to use the sessreg command
within ~/.xinitrc:

1) setuid /usr/bin/sessreg: possibly multiple security holes;

2) use sudo: I really don't understand why, but that doesn't work; I
mean, the output from who/w is different w.r.t. the expected one (there
is no line related to the active X session, even if the reported number
of users seems ok);

3) adding users to utmp group (which is equivalent to open /var/run/utmp
and /var/log/wtmp in writing to all); this is my "favorite hack" at the
moment, but I feel it is still suboptimal.

Any hints? Other strategies adopted? Suggestions related to point 2)?

I'm looking forward to hearing from gurus!

Thanks for your time

-- 
Alessandro DE LAURENZIS
[mailto:just22.adl@×××××.com]
LinkedIn: http://it.linkedin.com/in/delaurenzis