Re: Multiple sessions for the same user?



Hi,

Stef Walter wrote:
This may be a dumb question, but I'm wondering if we support (or it is a
goal to support) multiple sessions for the same user in GNOME.

As far as I can tell a lot of GNOME software doesn't currently take that
into account. I'm working on gnome-keyring-daemon, and I'm wondering if
I need to keep multiple sessions in mind or just take the much simpler
approach of one session per user.


Everything needs to hang off either the session dbus daemon or the X server, then it should Just Work for multiple sessions. By "hang off" I mean some arrangement such that the user gets 1 daemon for each X server or dbus bus, and such that the 1 daemon exits when either the X server or the dbus bus exits. The lifetime of the X server and the dbus bus should be the same (they should exit together) in a properly-configured GNOME setup, so it does not matter which one you use.

The only other, possibly-sane alternative is per-machine or per-(user,machine) or per-(session,machine) scoping (i.e. have a socket in /tmp, or hang off the system dbus daemon, possibly including username or dbus session uuid in the socket or bus name). However, this is wrong for most purposes, so be careful. And you have to be sure there's some way to exit the daemon when there are no active sessions.

Historical GNOME problems in this area have come from gconfd and Bonobo components getting the scoping wrong; they should have been per-session, but were not.

The temptation is to think that per-user scoping is possible, but it isn't. One reason is that there's no way to coordinate copies of the daemon on multiple machines. You can't reliably have a network connection between machines, and fcntl() locking in the home directory does not reliably work in the real world due to NFS and AFS. (If you need to do locking to support multiple daemons operating on one homedir, I suggest the approach used by the dbus cookie file code.)

Havoc



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