musings on session service mgmt

[Nils Philippsen]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 10:22 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 16:14 +0100, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 20:39 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > This may be obvious, but the "correct" solution is supposed to be that 
> > > apps should connect to either the X server or the session message bus 
> > > and they should exit when the X server or message bus does. (Both Xlib 
> > > and libdbus exit on disconnect by default for this reason.)
> > 
> > This would solve the problem above more cleanly.
> 
> Except that a decade of evidence shows us this is not the case.... but I
> guess you'd rather want the status quo, with all the security issues and
> perceived instability, rather than a working and secure system...

Show me why your proposal (which you admitted can be circumvented
easily) is better or more secure than fixing the handful of programs
that don't end themselves when the session exits. If we don't talk about
hostile processes which actively circumvent, we're talking about dumb
processes. These should be fixed rather than declaring stuff which up to
now worked correctly as erroneous just to avoid doing the fixing. Where
is the difficulty in letting these handful of processes either connect
to dbus, X11 or the session manager and bail out if the connection dies?
I'm curious.

> (But then again, this is the typical story of the Linux desktop; we
> can't ever change or fix a thing because people who use the desktop in
> rather strange (dare I even say perverse?) ways (e.g. expecting
> processes to keep running) will start complaining as soon as we change
> something that will break their highly-customized setups and habits. Do
> not pass start. Do not collect $100. Instead let the naysayers and
> status quo win.)

David, you need to accept that there are people who use computers
differently than you think they should. This doesn't make them second
class users. Only because an approach is different from what exists
already, that doesn't make it better. I like to think that much can be
achieved without hurting existing users. If that makes me a naysayer, it
makes you a yeasayer which is almost equally bad ;-).

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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