musings on session service mgmt

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 12:04 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> 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.

Lots of programs (including GNOME ones) daemonizes e.g. creates their
own process group etc. etc. so clearly we can't rely on this. 

That's why we need to iterate over the process list and send SIGHUP to
processes matching the uid and XDG_SESSION_COOKIE (or other attribute
but XDG_SESSION_COOKIE is what we have right now). It's not really
rocket science.

> > > 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.  

You are being vague here; I think you just use that term because Havoc
said something vague about a babysitter execing stuff. The way I read
this (it's vague so I'm guessing) sounds like it needs source code
modification and if it isn't clear I don't think that's an 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.

I think that is what they call wishful thinking. Seriously.

     David