[systemd-devel] User sessions, session buses, user buses

[Simon McVittie]

On 30/01/15 22:53, Elias Probst wrote:
> IMHO, env variables are something we should get rid of in the long term.
> It might be fine for now to provide some legacy-compatibility mechanisms
> (like your not-yet-written tool), but to me environment variables are
> something straight out of the dark ages.

Environment variables are specified by POSIX, also available in Windows,
and one of the few easy ways for information to inherit from a parent
process to a child process without the child process needing to do
anything explicitly. I don't think they're going to go away, however
much you might want them to - the "long tail" of (mostly TUI) programs
that use them is very long indeed.

I do agree that the number of them that are necessary should go down
over time (and my distro of choice, Debian, has a policy of "everything
we ship should be usable without manually setting magic environment
variables"), but I don't think it is likely to go down to zero.

> The long-term goal (also in a world where a graphical session is managed
> as a systemd user-session), the information provided until now by an
> environment variable should be queried dynamically by e.g. a D-Bus call
> to the component responsible for providing the relevant information.

Environment variables do several different things.

Having a quick skim through my `env` output, here are some distinct
categories:

We talked about LANG a bit at the hackfest, and the consensus seemed to
be that something better should happen, but nobody was sure exactly
what. I don't set LC_* but if I did, they'd be in the same category.

Losing DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS was part of the point of this thread.
:-) Similarly, DISPLAY, GPG_AGENT_INFO, SSH_AUTH_SOCK should be able to
go away one day, when those things grow support for
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR-based socket-activation. XAUTHORITY can go away
eventually too, even in X11 environments, in favour of "xhost
+SI:localuser:smcv" (which in fact gdm already does).

DEBEMAIL, LESS, LS_COLORS, PYTHONSTARTUP, SHELL, SSH_ASKPASS, VISUAL are
configuration, and could in principle be read from a dotfile instead
(although good luck porting every last consumer of EDITOR, SHELL and
VISUAL to your new world order - e.g. Debian has more than 37k packages).

XDG_SEAT, XDG_SESSION_ID, XDG_VTNR are properties of my login-session,
not my user-session or my home directory, so you can't write them to
either XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or a dotfile because both would be the wrong scope.

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR has to be an environment variable because you can't very
well read it from the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR :-)

    S