[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#792307: closed by Brian Potkin <claremont102 at gmail.com> (Re: Bug#863974: hplip should not require systemd)

[Christian Mueller]

Correct, sorry, I've been running without any systemd components for 
such a long time that I forgot the details. Either way, systemd 
components are currently pulled in and activated (logind-systemd).

I don't have a good example for Linux off the top of my head because 
I've removed systemd a long time ago but maybe an example from OS X 
(which seems to be the origin of quite a few concepts introduced with 
systemd) explains my general problem: the socket used for X11 is stored 
in a private tmp diretory which can't be accessed by other users, thus I 
can't su to another login and still use X11 programs. That's what breaks 
my workflow - I usually have two or three different logins active on the 
same desktop and private tmp directories break things for me sooner or 
later. Of course I can set up a shared directory accessible by all users 
but that's not the point. Plus the ever-growing list of tmpfs mount 
points is really getting to me.

I know that ConsoleKit is no longer maintained but that's what I'm using 
right now because it's set up as a dependency. Maybe it would be 
possible to ditch all dependencies to "fast user switching" without 
systemd and go back to the old way of things where ownership of console 
devices is set to whoever logs into a local console when no other 
console is active. This way, folks who don't want Linux turned into 
something resembling Windows or OS X can work the way they're used to 
and all others can have systemd and all the things that come with it...

Like I said, I'm more than happy to provide a patch for policykit that 
does all that dynamically, i.e. doesn't need hard dependencies to 
systemd but uses it when present, dynamically loading the systemd libs. 
But if there's no interest it would be a waste of time. I'd also be 
willing to step up as maintainer for ConsolKit if that helps. Or both.

On 06/04/2017 11:05 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Jun 2017 at 22:50:58 +0200, Christian Mueller wrote:
>> (separate temp mount points for
>> each user) which, apart from the incredible clutter in the list of mounted
>> file systems, breaks my workflows (I need a single /tmp for all users).
> systemd-logind mounts a small tmpfs at /run/user/$uid for each concurrent
> user, as its way to implement XDG_RUNTIME_DIR without letting users cause
> denial of service by filling up /run. /tmp remains visible to all users.
>
>> Just having a version of policykit-1 compiled without systemd
>> dependencies would solve all our issues and it's a tiny little change in the
>> rules file.
> The change is tiny, but the support burden is not.
>
> To be able to implement the policies that it provides, polkit needs a
> way to determine which users are logged-in, which of those logged-in
> users are local (getty, xdm etc. but not ssh), and which of those local
> users are on the active VT. Historically, that was implemented by
> ConsoleKit, which no longer has upstream maintainers[1], and does not
> appear to have Debian maintainers either. On Linux systems (with
> either systemd, sysvinit + systemd-shim or Upstart + systemd-shim)
> the replacement is systemd-logind.
>
>      S
>
> [1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ConsoleKit/