[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#453755: some console keystrokes ignored when dbus-launch is running

[Simon McVittie]

retitle 453755 dbus-launch consumes characters from stdin if run manually
severity 453755 normal
tags 453755 + help wontfix
thanks

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 17:17:53 -0600, Owen Heisler wrote:
> Package: dbus
> Version: 1.1.2-1
> Severity: important
> 
> When I first boot up the system, about 40% of the keystrokes on the console are 
> ignored, like: if I type "startx" and hit enter, I'll see "sart" or somesuch.  
The upstream bug/misfeature still exists, but since 1.4.12-4, the Xsession
integration script in Debian should avoid this by running it in a
different way.

On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 at 20:22:57 +0100, Paride Legovini wrote:
> I get it since I installed the SLiM login manager (package 'slim').

I was able to reproduce the bug with slim installed in a virtual machine,
and upgrading to 1.4.12-4 did fix it.

> 	It seems that dbus-daemon is listening on stdin, and ssh 
> sessions are unusable.
[...]
>         eval ‘dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session‘

This usage will still have this bug, though (you want to add </dev/null
to the dbus-launch invocation, probably). Side note: you should also use
backquotes ("`"), not apostrophe/single-quotes ("'") - it's documented
correctly in the man page.

Nobody seems to know why dbus-launch wants to read from stdin in the first
place: my best guess is that it was an attempt to make dbus-launch and
dbus-daemon automatically exit at the end of a ssh login session, so it's
somewhat ironic that ssh login sessions are the very thing it breaks!

It'd be easy to remove the reading-from-stdin, but until we know why
it does that in the first place, it's not clear what would break. So, I'm
not going to change its behaviour in a Debian patch - if the reason for
watching stdin is unimportant or wrong, we should sort it out upstream
instead.

Regards,
    Simon