Dbus session daemon and remote DISPLAY

[Grahame Bowland]

Hi all

I've had a look through the list archives (in particular the "Session
dbus-daemons not killed after logout") thread, but I can't see a
solution to this particular problem.

I have a number of users running a Gtk+ program. They run that program
on one of several servers, exporting DISPLAY to the particular
X-terminal that they are using. DISPLAY is an actual X terminal, not
an SSH tunnel; it will remain "alive" for as long as that terminal is
powered up.

Whenever a user starts up the Gtk File dialog, a new Dbus session
daemon is started by the gnome-vfs daemon. This is via:
  dbus-launch --autolaunch 9abda<...> --binary-syntax
and produces a process such as:
  dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
and we're using dbus-1.0.2.

The problem is that as far as I can tell, dbus-daemon will never exit
unless the DISPLAY becomes unavailable. There's no "session" for it to
exit with; it was fired up by a standalone Gtk program. As the tuple
of (display, UUID) is used to determine whether a new daemon is
needed, we'll end up with dbus-session daemons around for every
DISPLAY. This can result in quite a lot of processes hanging about.

Any suggestions how to fix this would be great. A kludge would be to
add an inactivity timeout to dbus-daemon, but this wouldn't work well
for the normal session bus use case. Should gnome-vfs (or
dbus-launch?) be telling the dbus-daemon that there's no session to
exit with, and that it should exit with the PID of the process that
started it (my program?)

Thanks!
Grahame