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Re: Should libpam-elogind Provide libpam-systemd ?



On Mon, 05 Nov 2018 at 08:44:45 +0100, Philipp Kern wrote:
> Do you know if any idea was
> already floated somewhere on how to make this work? I.e. have multiple
> systemd user instances per user?

This is specifically not supported. `systemd --user` always has the
same semantics as the $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR that it uses: it is one per uid
per machine. If you need multiple instances of foo per uid, then foo
must either not be a systemd user service, or be an instanced user
service (e.g. you could have a foo@.service with instances like
foo@0.service for X11 display :0, if that's how foo is meant to work).

The D-Bus session bus can be configured to be either one per uid per
machine, i.e. one per `systemd --user` (install dbus-user-session)
or one per X11 display (don't install dbus-user-session, do install
dbus-x11), depending on what you think "session" should mean. This is
why the dbus-user-session package is separate from dbus: it gives you
an opt-in or opt-out for the one-per-uid semantics. In some non-Debian
distros, you don't get that choice: for example, in Arch Linux and Fedora,
there is a single dbus package that contains the equivalent of both our
dbus and our dbus-user-session.

> In our case a remote desktop is spawned in parallel to the regular one,
> in the background. That makes for all sort of weird behavior

Yes, it will tend to. Many applications and services don't really cope
gracefully with multiple instances sharing a home directory. D-Bus does,
but many of the applications and services that communicate via D-Bus
don't (in particular, dconf has last-write-wins semantics that can lose
writes, and other configuration storage mechanisms will usually have
similar behaviour).

If you want a separate foo for the GUI and the remote desktop, then foo
cannot be run as a (non-instanced) systemd user service. If you want to
share foo between the two, then it can (and probably should).

    smcv


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