On 2017-06-28 Gilles Detillieux wrote:
Not that I'm defending systemd in any way (perish the thought!), but I'm wondering if it might have something more basic and Unix-y behind it. Does it matter whether you have actual login shells on your ttys? I.e. does write depend on entries in /run/utmp or /var/log/wtmp? Do your ttys show up in a who listing on both the systems that work and those that don't? If not, try something else like the -ls option to xterm, or a login via ssh.
Good ideas. No: my ptys don't show up in who. And I'm using gnome-terminal. So I tried your xterm -ls idea and write works fine between xterms! So it's a gnome-term or vte's fault then. I tried xterm without -ls and it still works. In fact, xterms still show up in who even without -ls.
Interesting, who doesn't show any entry for any gnome-term pts, just 1 entry for the X/dm session I assume. And gnome-term doesn't have any option for -ls (doesn't have very many options at all as they continually dumb it down).
I'll file a bz against gnome-term / vte for this as I'm pretty sure it's supposed to work. And I know it used to, last year this worked no problem. Big changes always occurring in vte so I'm not too surprised.
Thanks Detillieux brothers!