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marios | 5 years ago

At some point, systemd introduced a RemainAfterExit= option, which killed all user started programs when the user logged out. IIRC, this is because of some misbehaving gnome application that wouldn't quit properly.

Of course, since this hack solved the gnome bug, it was enabled by default by many, thus breaking applications like screen and tmux.

What should have been done is fix the issue in whatever offending application. Certainly not at systemd level. Because in that case, you need to do some insane things (IMO), like link tmux with libsystemd [1].

[1] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428nk

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majewsky|5 years ago

> At some point, systemd introduced a RemainAfterExit= option, which killed all user started programs when the user logged out. IIRC, this is because of some misbehaving gnome application that wouldn't quit properly.

The backstory is actually enlightening to me. To me, RemainAfterExit just seemed like the obvious sane decision and I actually wondered why it ever was different. When a user logs out, I absolutely want everything cleaned up after them unless they explicitly want something like screen or tmux to linger.

> you need to do some insane things (IMO), like link tmux with libsystemd

That would probably be the easiest choice for the tmux devs. If they don't want to link libsystemd, they could have accessed logind's DBus interface directly (either by calling dbus-send(1) or via libdbus). Contrary to wide-spread belief, systemd does, in fact, present well-defined and documented interfaces that other daemons can implement as well (and they do, see elogind). libsystemd is not magical.

marios|5 years ago

As pointed out by JdeBP, I confused RemainAfterExit= with KillUserProcess=. RemainAfterExit is an option indicating how systemd should process a unit file, while KillUserProcess is for systemd itself.

It's nice to know that libsystemd is not required in all cases, but I still have a problem with software having to be modified because systemd changes how libc's daemon() function behaves.