musings on session service mgmt

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 17:19 +0100, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> 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.

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.. rather
than going through every potential program in the distro (or on the
planet) that people may launch in their session. There's an analogy
here: Maintaining a whitelist is a lot easier than maintaining a
blacklist.

> 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, it's very evident you are in the annoying "oh, but it's worked
this way forever so we can't change it" camp. You need to accept that
some of us are not and your camp is sometimes perceived as hindering
progress. The indisputable fact is that X11 session service management
is just *broken* as I outlined in my original mail. The fact that some
people take advantage of this brokenness via screen, nohup etc. doesn't
mean we shouldn't fix the fundamental problem. Doesn't mean either we
shouldn't fix the few oddball cases such as screen and nohup to opt out
of getting reaped.

        David