[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#735521: Bug#764841: please use pam_exec to display "dynamic" motd

[Faidon Liambotis]

Hi,

Two years later, the situation has changed a bit. Most of the fixes in
the other packages are in. PAM was fixed to generate its contents under
/run/motd.dynamic (#743286), login dropped its pam_exec call in favor of
pam_motd (since 1:4.4-3) that Josh mentioned above, mimicking what SSH
has been doing (and what Ubuntu has been doing for a long time).

There is really no point in shipping /etc/init.d/motd anymore. It
currently just runs "uname -snrvm > /var/run/motd.dynamic" but this is
being regenerated by both login and sshd via pam_motd anyway on every
login, so it's completely useless right now.

It's also being masked by default by systemd:
$ ls -l /lib/systemd/system/motd.service
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar  2 10:21 /lib/systemd/system/motd.service -> /dev/null

So in the majority of systems, it's not even being invoked anymore, and
hasn't been since at least jessie.

TL;DR: please drop /etc/init.d/motd from initscripts, it's an entirely
redudant file these days.

Thanks,
Faidon