Bug#825394: systemd kill background processes after user logs out

[Guus Sliepen]

Package: systemd
Version: 230-1
Severity: normal

>From the changelog of systemd version 230:

> systemd-logind will now by default terminate user processes that are
> part of the user session scope unit (session-XX.scope) when the user
> logs out.

It is now indeed the case that any background processes that were still
running are killed automatically when the user logs out of a session,
whether it was a desktop session, a VT session, or when you SSHed into a
machine.

Now you can no longer expect a long running background processes to
continue after logging out. I believe this breaks the expecations of
many users. For example, you can no longer start a screen or tmux
session, log out, and expect to come back to it. For this reason, I
think it is a bad decision on the part of the systemd maintainers to
enable this feature by default, and it should rather be disabled by
default in Debian, either by compiling systemd with
--without-kill-user-processes or by setting KillUserProcesses=no in
/etc/systemd/logind.conf.

-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=nl_NL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages systemd depends on:
ii  adduser         3.114
ii  libacl1         2.2.52-3
ii  libapparmor1    2.10-4
ii  libaudit1       1:2.5.2-1
ii  libblkid1       2.28-5
ii  libc6           2.22-9
ii  libcap2         1:2.25-1
ii  libcap2-bin     1:2.25-1
ii  libcryptsetup4  2:1.7.0-2
ii  libgcrypt20     1.7.0-2
ii  libgpg-error0   1.22-2
ii  libkmod2        22-1.1
ii  liblzma5        5.1.1alpha+20120614-2.1
ii  libmount1       2.28-5
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.2
ii  libseccomp2     2.3.1-1
ii  libselinux1     2.5-3
ii  libsystemd0     230-1
ii  mount           2.28-5
ii  util-linux      2.28-5

Versions of packages systemd recommends:
ii  dbus            1.10.8-1
ii  libpam-systemd  230-1

Versions of packages systemd suggests:
pn  systemd-container  <none>
ii  systemd-ui         3-4

Versions of packages systemd is related to:
ii  udev  230-1

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/systemd/system.conf changed [not included]

-- no debconf information