[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#815503: dbus-x11: Several session buses if scripts in Xsession.d use D-Bus

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 at 16:03:48 +0100, Ksamak wrote:
> Sorry about the noise, just a notive that i just spent a couple hours struggling with this
> bug, and trying to understand why orca didn't want to run.
> I guess some of our users will also run into this, i'll keep track of
> that.
> Thank you for the patch.

If applied to jessie or a jessie-based derivative, the patch on this bug
will cause just as many issues as it solves. I tried the same change
back in 2011, and it caused regressions. Given the choice between a
pre-existing bug and a new bug of similar severity, I would prefer to keep
the existing bug - "we have the same bugs we always had, instead of new
ones" is stability of a sort. Sorry you're affected by the existing bug,
but the alternative isn't significantly better.

With the dbus-update-activation-environment change in 1.10 (which was
primarily done to support dbus-user-session), this patch is less risky,
and I'm considering applying it in stretch (only) on that basis.

The fundamental issue here is that the two roles of Xsession.d - setting
environment variables that should apply to "everything", and starting
long-running background processes that are likely be affected by those
environment variables - are in conflict. If possible, I would recommend
talking to your services' upstream developers about ways to resolve this
permanently, which include:

* starting long-running background processes after Xsession.d, for
  example from /etc/xdg/autostart/, at least when in an environment
  like GNOME that is known to use /etc/xdg/autostart/

* starting long-running background processes on-demand (D-Bus
  and/or systemd activation) instead of "eagerly"

* configuring packages to work by default or read settings from
  configuration files, instead of requiring special environment
  variables, where possible

* communicating transient settings via $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, where
  supported (either libpam-systemd or libpam-xdg-support must
  be present)

    S