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

[John Brooks]

On Sun, 29 May 2016 11:46:36 +0200 Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org> wrote:
 > I'm sure the majority of users couldn't care less either way. What we
 > have to think about is: does the minority of people who really want this
 > feature (for example, because you want your homedir to be locked
 > whenever possible) outweigh the minority of people who really don't
 > want this feature (because they lose time/work when their processes get
 > killed unexpectedly)?

Actually, I think this would be of concern to anyone who uses screen or 
tmux to manage their sessions and/or run background processes (not 
limited to screen/tmux either). It may be a minority, but I'm sure it's 
a significant amount of people. Most of them wouldn't be following this 
news or posting here, however. As for whether which group of people is 
right, I think the principle of least surprise decides that easily; the 
people who want it can enable it manually, and the people that don't can 
continue operating as they have always done without having to be aware 
of this.

On Sun, 29 May 2016 11:13:32 +0200 Martin Pitt <mpitt at debian.org> wrote:
 > 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).

Most Debian installations (derivatives notwithstanding) are on servers, 
not workstations. I think it's a safe assumption that most of them would 
prefer that the system behaves in a way that is optimal for the server 
use case.