Fwd: User bus conclusion

[Inge Wallin]

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 00:29:32 Thiago Macieira wrote:
> D-Bus community is proposing to do away with the session bus and replace it
> with a user bus. Long story short, this means that multiple logins of the
> same user are not allowed by construction.
> 
> Is this something we allow or even support in KDE?
> 
> My first reaction to Ryan's email was to say that we do not want the new
> feature. Services like KWallet would show the password dialog in possibly
> the wrong X display, klauncher-launched applications would show up in the
> wrong X display, etc., so it would be unusable.
> 
> However, on second thought, I came to the conclusion that running two
> instances of kwalletd would be a problem of itself: the two wallets trying
> to have write access at the same time could end up stepping over each
> other's toes, causing data loss (one of the instance's changes or, worse,
> all of the data).
> 
> So I have to ask again: do we allow or support multiple logins of the same
> user, on the same machine (same $HOME)?

I am very much against this change if I understood it correctly. It is 
disastrous for the thin client use case.

It's not unusual that I have a machine where I'm logged in at the console and 
where I later also log in via a thin client connection. This thin client 
connection uses a local XVnc server which is a normal X server that uses 
normal RAM instead of the graphics card. If I understood correctly, this would 
no longer work.

Even worse is the "published applications" scenario where a user connects to a 
server to just use one application. If the network connection is not fast, the 
X protocol is no good, and something else has to be used, like VNC. In many 
cases a scenario like this is implemented as a XVnc server without any desktop 
where the application is the lone user of that X server.  If I understood 
correctly, this would also no longer work.

	-Inge