remote finger no longer work, local finger limited (pinky vs finger)

[Shang Wu]

SRU Justificaiton
-----------------

Impact:

This update allows remote finger to work if a proper finger client is installed.

Fix:

A minor code change that has gnome-nettool attempt to use the 'finger' before falling back to 'pinky' instead of vice-versa.

Patch:

The changes have been applied to gnome-nettool git master branch in commit 89e0bb648e9e8bd96a5eb5e0284abf74fc244c95. I've attached a debdiff in comment #5.

Regression Potential:

There should be very little potential for regression.

Test Case:

* Install finger (sudo apt-get install finger)
* Run gnome-nettool
* Select the 'finger' tab.
* Enter the hostname of a machine running a finger server and the username of a properly configured account.

gnome-nettool should display the finger information returned by the remote host.

------------------------

Binary package hint: gnome-nettool

This is a duplicated entry for the gnome upstream bug#611408

Simon Paillard [reporter] 2010-02-28 15:20:55 UTC

Hello,

This has been reported intially in http://bugs.debian.org/550991

Remote finger no longer works.
It seems the switch from finger to pinky caused a regression in finger feature.

> gnome-nettool's finger functionality does not work. If I try to finger
> <email address hidden> or <email address hidden> (or anyone else, for
> that matter), it sends no packets, and produces only the output:
>
> Login Name TTY Idle When Where

This seems to be a regression since 2.22.1-1, after the switch to pinky
as finger program, introduced after the resolution of:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=549588
commit a9eaa17cdae8563e19e1afc2aebe64e534a4da85
2008-12-04 02:56 German Poo-Caamano Fixed #549588. Try to use pinky
instead of finger. Use finger as fallback.

$ pinky <email address hidden>
Login Name TTY Idle When Where

It doesn't seem pinky is able to do the same job as finger does.

[john morimore (paradigmshifter1)]

what does "remote finger" and "pinky" refer to?

[Ayan George (ayan)]

pinky does not use finger's network prototcol -- it only looks on the local machine.

gnome-nettool/src/finger.c seems to even prefer pinky:

  program = util_find_program_in_path ("pinky", NULL);

  if (program != NULL) {
    program_name = g_strdup ("pinky");
  } else {
    program = util_find_program_dialog ("finger", parent);
    program_name = g_strdup ("finger");
  }

So if both pink and finger exist, it'll still use pinky. Perhaps the logic should be:

  program = util_find_program_in_path ("finger", NULL);

  if (program != NULL) {
    program_name = g_strdup ("finger");
  } else {
    program = util_find_program_dialog ("pinky", parent);
    program_name = g_strdup ("pinky");
  }

[Ayan George (ayan)]

Created upstream bug and submitted patch:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653637

[Ayan George (ayan)]

Patch was reviewed and committed upstream.