Hi,

I have the following with gramps on kubuntu ( KDE ).
My terminals are "konsole". They don't register their pty
in utmp and I think they are correct. We are already logged. so if we register again for each konsole, we have a bad user count.

In these case, os.getlogin() return :
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

I think getlogin should use the DISPLAY instead of the tty when we get this error.

to correct this problem I use :

try:
     user=os.getlogin()
except:
     user=os.environ.get("USER")

but I'm not sure os.environ.get return the good value on every OSes ...

I have tested too :
except:
     user = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid())[0]

What is the best solution  to this problem.

I looked at all bugs about getlogin and I saw we should avoid this function.
What is in this case the function we should use and which works correctly on every OS ( Linux, Unices, Windows, MAC OS/X, ... )

os.getlogin is a wrapper around the getlogin(3) POSIX function. It is important that Python exposes the function as-is, rather than trying to be more clever than the operating system designers. getlogin(3) is specified as "getlogin()  returns a pointer to a string containing the name of the user logged in on the controlling terminal of the process, or a null pointer if this information cannot be determined." See the man page for the precise list of error conditions; ENOENT is returned if there is no utmp entry.

Whether konsole is correct in not listing the controlling terminal in utmp, I don't know. Notice that xterm (which should be considered an authority in such matters) *does* create an utmp entry.

It's not clear to me how DISPLAY could be used at all, but even if it could, using it here would be incorrect.

Closing as invalid.