User bus conclusion

[Ryan Lortie]

hi Havoc,

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 21:08 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> User bus is misleading. If you have network-wide user accounts, then
> those users can have N buses, 1 per machine, not a single bus. The
> buses typically would all share the same home directory.

> If you insist on a new name for the bus in the dbus APIs, please use
> USER_ON_HOST or something, not just USER, for the enum value.

We considered really a lot of names, including the rather ridiculous
SYSTEM_USER and USER_SYSTEM.  We settled on USER as being the
least-ridiculous.


>                                                             But I
> think just recycling SESSION is OK here. What you're doing is changing
> how the OS will define a session. The bus still corresponds to a
> session.

I disagree for a couple of reasons: mostly because this concept of
"session" is getting more and more confusing and the idea of first login
to last logout (including multiple distinct graphical logins) is not
something that most people would call "a session".


The second reason is that we may want to keep the session bus around for
some of the special situations that Lennart mentioned.  Also, if it
turns out that people *really really* want multiple graphical sessions
per user, the distinction could remain useful.

We briefly discussed the possibility on IRC that we would keep both
"user" and "session" busses and let applications decide what they want
to use based on their intention -- services like dconf are user, bus
names held for application uniqueness are session.  For most normal uses
these two busses would actually be the same bus (the user bus) but for
weird setups, people could separate them.  I'm not sure if the
additional confusion that this adds would be worth it.


Cheers