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

[Martin Pitt]

Michael Biebl [2016-05-27 14:09 +0200]:
> The new requirement of having to enable lingering and starting
> tmux/screen/nohup/ via systemd-run can certainly be considered a
> nuisance and something our users are not necessarily aware of.
> I share that concern.
> So a NEWS.Debian entry would be the least we should do. And maybe
> documenting it in the release notes.
> 
> That all said, we'll discuss that within the team. I couldn't get hold
> of Martin on irc, so this might take a couple of days (I won't be around
> much over the weekend).

Sorry, I've been away for a few days. I'll return to normal work
tomorrow.

I've long wanted to enable killing leftover processes on logout. In my
world, that's what I actually expect when I log out of a computer, and
I *don't* want anything running as my user any more (which in turn
keeps my encrypted home dir unlocked too). I never got around to
enabling the option, but the upstream change was a welcome nudge to
actually enable this. I believe this *is* it the expected thing to do
on personal computers. This is certainly different in environments
like universities where one often does put long-running stuff in the
background, but this doesn't appeal to me as being the behaviour to
optimize for.  At the moment I'm not sure whether this bug report and
the followups are just a vocal minority or somewhat representative of
Debian's user (I lean towards the former).

However, this really shouldn't be such a general problem: If/when we
can change tmux and screen to use PAM or enable lingering, then I
think we get the best of both worlds: Logging out would clean up
properly, but the (relatively few) users who use screen/tmux on a PC
would get the expected behaviour of those processes surviving. So I'm
fine with reverting to the previous behaviour until a more
fine-grained API (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3382) is
available. Michael, WDYT?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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