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

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Martin Pitt <mpitt at debian.org> [2016-05-29 11:13 +0200]:
> 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.

The problem with this statement that I have is that we're the
universal operating system, and while that should not keep us from
"optimising", we really ought not light-heartedly move away from how
things have worked ever since the inception of multics/unix/linux.

It may well be that a non-negligible part of our user base would
benefit from this new behaviour, but at this stage, assuming that
the majority would want this change and calling those speaking up
here a "vocal minority" is IMHO not the right thing to do. Even if
you were to have a GR over this, I don't think the right response
should be to just fix it one way for everyone, especially not since
those people in charge of hundreds of systems have exactly one vote,
similar to those who just develop for their own home workstation.

We have a tool to handle divergent default behaviours in Debian and
it's called debconf. systemd-logind should engage debconf and prompt
on upgrade/install what the local behaviour should be. And until the
point comes that we have enough data to determine that we're
inconveniencing the majority of our users with the default (i.e.
they are choosing the other behaviour), we should leave the default
as how it's been.

> 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.

There is more than tmux and screen. For instance, my shell knows
that I specifically do *not* want it to HUP background processes
when I leave the shell session:

  http://git.madduck.net/v/etc/zsh.git/blob/HEAD:/.zsh/zshrc/99_TODO#l31

Please do not assume that everything is as simple as how you're
portraying it to be. Linux is a very very very diverse ecosystem and
it grew to be such as a function of the principle of least surprise,
among other things.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o> @martinkrafft
: :'  :  proud Debian developer
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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