:: Re: [DNG] What is a user-init?
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Lähettäjä: Didier Kryn
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Vastaanottaja: dng
Aihe: Re: [DNG] What is a user-init?
Le 10/12/2023 à 23:31, Alexandros Prekates via Dng a écrit :
> If we accept the posibillity that a user would want to start
> daemon like programs (so that means a different kind of program that we
> usually relate to a user that we usually think would do word processing,
> video editing , gaming ,browsing and generally information processing
> tasks that involve close-frequent involvment of the user in the
> processing loop and not automation ) then i think a need arise for
> a supervisor of those user-daemons and of course a need to initiate
> those user daemons (handling dependencies, initial config etc) .


    There are already such dæmons running in every user's desktop
session: Policykit, ssh-agent, clipman, screen-saver, plus home-made.
Plus some others clearly related to the way the desktop manager works,
eg Xfce notification daemon.

    Nobody as ever considered it usefull to have them "monitored".
Maybe some are, but essentially, they are started at sesion's startup
and they exit at logout.

    The purpose of system-wide dæmons being monitored is for them to
restart without an intervention of the admin, either because the host is
remote or the admin is busy. These dæmons provide essential system
services such as syslog, ssh, cups, ntp, http. All these not only need
priviledges, but some of them simply grant that the host is reachable to
users, and even to admin.

    Of course users are not doing only emails text editing and
futilities, some do complicated and long calculations on big data, some
control industrial processes or acquire data online, and this has
existed long before the advent of word processing, graphic terminals,
and even email. Some of these activites need non-priviledged dæmons,
but, like every human activity, they also require some attendance from
the human who operates them. I mean the server is there to serve the
human requests, therefore, if the dæmon crashes the user restarts it and
finds the bugs so that it crashes less and less.

    If your dæmon needs dbus, the simple fact that is is started with
your session implies that dbus is started (if installed); therefore the
dependency *is* granted. If it is so fragile that you get tired of
restarting it, you can easily invoque it from within a loop in a shell
script.

--     Didier