Init : someone could comment this ?

Casey Dahlin cjdahlin at ncsu.edu
Sun Jan 6 11:14:27 UTC 2008


Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le samedi 05 janvier 2008 à 22:26 -0500, Casey Dahlin a écrit :
>
>   
>> There's a few issues with prcsys internally that make it very difficult 
>> to add the features we want (dbus etc), as well as some not-so-trivial 
>> implementation issues (use of pthreads in a circumstance under which 
>> they were a very poor choice), so Harald Hoyer and myself decided that a 
>> rewrite was in order, so I went ahead and started working on a new app 
>> (which I have titled 'rrn') which is now near feature parity with 
>> prcsys. 
>>     
>
> It would be very nice if the next-gen init system didn't limit itself to
> the system init part but also covered session init steps. The desktop
> team is dead-set against system-wide daemons¹, and as a result we've
> seen a flourishing of in-session "helpers", all launched in a
> more-or-less hackish, racish and unsatisfactory way: 
> – when the state of the art for PA is to pretend it's ESD to be
> launched, there are clearly huge problems in our session init handling.
> – sometimes you do a ps and see stray session daemons remaining alive
> hours after session close
> – it's not uncommon for GNOME to start doing things before initialising
> its settings, causing users to wonder why the theme or fonts change 3s
> after starting an app
> – etc
>
> Session init and system init seem very similar problems to me, and if we
> ever want to go early login like windows, we'll need to coordinate
> session init steps with the system init steps not finished yet. Of
> course there are complications (you need to merge system presets and
> user preferences, take the kind of login² and DE into account) but the
> similarities should far outweight the differences.
>
> Regards,
>
> ¹ with some good and a lot of bad (IMHO) reasons
> ² is it so different from classical system init levels?
>
>   
I'd be happy to take a look at this problem once we've gotten the core 
problem out of the way.

PA in particular really could do to be a system wide service. What if we 
activated GDM greeter noises?

--CJD




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