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Re: How to cause a process started in .xsessionrc to terminate with x-session termination?



On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:34PM +0000, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 03:46:48PM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > (I still wonder whether systemd offers anything relevant here.  And if
> > not, what the hell *is* the point of systemctl --user?  I've never used
> > it, nor found any reason to use it.  Yet.)
> 
> systemd certainly does offer something here. It's related to what
> processes are considered to belong to a "session", it came in with
> version 230, and there was quite a stink about it from people who
> wanted this not to happen, at the time:
> <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825394>
> 
> It seems that the Debian Xsession setup does start a systemd --user
> service. I've never tried to use it for this purpose.

I've seen that bug before.  That's a change which got reverted, or at
least, the default behavior was returned to the previous norm.

Debian's /etc/systemd/logind.conf has

#KillUserProcesses=no

which indicates that the default is for this "kill everything the user
left running" setting to be disabled, as it was before the controversial
change.

I think this is a dead end for this particular question, because it's
an all-or-nothing setting.  Either *all* background processes that the
user creates get nuked when the user logs out, or *none* of them do.  There
doesn't appear to be a way to "mark" particular processes for reaping
while leaving the rest alone.

Maybe some other part of systemd offers more flexibility, but if so, I
don't know what part it would be.  I'm still waiting to see an actual
user-friendly *document* that describes how to use systemd.


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