musings on session service mgmt

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 11:40 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 11:37 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 11:29 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > 
> > > Maybe it's just me, but I think it's a lot easier to just fix the few
> > > programs such as screen and nohup to opt out of getting reaped.. 
> > 
> > Unix has had a pretty standard definition of "session" using SIGHUP.
> > The way programs have historically "opted out" of termination is to
> > ignore that signal.
> > 
> > I don't think we should change that.
> 
> Fine so we send a SIGHUP instead of SIGTERM, then SIGKILL. Makes this a
> lot easier.....

Sending SIGHUP to all processes manually is fine; in theory actually the
kernel will do this for you when the process session group leader exits.
Now, whether something is correctly set as the process group leader in
the twisted desktop login stack is an open question.  A regression here
would mostly be masked by the fact that *almost* everything run from the
desktop does connect to X11.

> > Rather, some programs should be fixed to gain a dep on X11, DBus, or be
> > run through the babysitter.
> 
> Why do you think it's a good idea to add libX11 or libdbus deps to a
> program that don't use either? Do you think random upstream projects
> would ever take such patches?

The babysitter is another option.  But I think (generally speaking) most
projects nowadays *should* gain a dbus dep, and if we can explain
clearly to them why it it useful, they would accept it.