In article <421528A9.1070501@incubus.de>,
Matthias Buelow  <mkb@incubus.de> wrote:
>Greywolf wrote:
>
>> And finally, to address perhaps the most simple characteristic regarding
>> wtmp, wtmpx, acct, lastlog and lastlogx:  It isn't broken by any stretch
>> of the imagination (save that wtmp records became too small with the
>> advent of the commercial internet!).  It doesn't need to be fixed.
>
>It is of course true that the status quo hardly warrants a rewrite of 
>the wtmp(x) mechanism and that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies 
>here..  I wager, however, that most people would also agree, that if it 
>were to be done anew, that for that purpose, a plain text file would 
>have many advantages over an opaque binary file.

I don't agree. Unless of course you are considering printing a
sockaddr_storage as a hex string and a timeval as a decimal pair
of numbers non-opaque.

christos