Let upstart init start and stop sessions.

[Stef Bon]

  Hello,

I'm having the idea to make upstart init responsible for starting and 
stopping sessions, since I know Upstart.

Recently I followed a discussion on the dbus maillist, about a user dbus 
(next to the session dbus or as a replacement... to deal with problems 
when a user is logged in more than once):

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2010-May/012774.html

In one of the messages there a link was provided to guide describing how 
the "launching" of daemons
and logins are handled (as far as I understand) with apple machines (OS X):

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2005/tn2083.html


Here the "launchd" is responsible for starting and stopping daemons, as 
wel text and graphical and remote sessions.

Now isn't it a good idea to make upstart init do all these things.

The daemons are started and manged already by upstart, usersessions not.
This is done by programs like kdm, sshd or agetty/login, making use of 
PAM. After authentification
a session is started by the program (here thus kdm,sshd or agetty/login).

Wouldn't it be better if the program sends an event to init to start a 
session, as requested, so for a agetty/login a text based session, for 
kdm (or gdm) a graphical session as requested (KDE or Gnome or...) and 
so on.
Upstart has to "decide" it will grant the request for a session or deny 
it (for reasons like to less system resources, too many users logged in...).

This is just an idea.

You can also think of the role of the authentification PAM, which is now 
done by the loginprogram self, which is linked against the PAM library. 
You can think of an "auth agent" (which on his turn will use PAM) which 
is started by init to do the trick.

Stef Bon

PS to readers on other maillinglists like dbus and consolekit, the 
original message is on

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/upstart-devel/