Re: [gentoo-soc] Two ideas: R package installer (CRAN) and per-user daemons

[Auke Booij <auke@tulcod.com>]

Petteri,

Thanks, there are indeed some solutions for users running X, but I
think a lot of services could benefit from being able to be started
without the user logging in (for example, webservers really should
launch clients' websites as fastcgi services at boot time) and without
having to run X anywhere.

As for who should handle this... there are some other ideas on the
ideas page concerning OpenRC, which I think is the most appropriate
project for this idea. And depending on the exact implementation, it
might very well be dependent upon the system's init.d software (in
this case OpenRC, but different distros use different systems). Ergo,
I'd say this idea does fit inside Gentoo's scope.

Auke.

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 18.3.2010 16.58, Auke Booij wrote:
>
>> 2. Per-user daemons. Currently, there are some daemons, like
>> PulseAudio, jackd, several download daemons, and soon possibly X.org
>> (which will no longer need to run as root, and really should run as a
>> normal user), which run as specific users, instead of root or a
>> systemwide daemon-specific user. There is currently no framework for
>> launching these daemons at all, and the current solution is to either
>> make users figure out their own solution (a popular one is an extra
>> line in .xinitrc), or to set the username in some conf.d file, thus
>> disabling the possibility to run several of them for different users.
>> I would like to develop an extension to our current init.d system
>> which will enable users to write and start their own init scripts,
>> which at first only run as themselves, not as another user. This would
>> make it possible to cleanly launch several identical daemons for
>> several users. This project would involve either writing a new
>> additional init.d system, or extend our current system. I would like
>> to know 1. if you guys are understanding a word of what I'm saying at
>> all 2. if this would be an interesting idea (I think it is, of course)
>> 3. anyone has any ideas or would like to mentor me.
>>
>
> Isn't this something that should be handled by the upstream projects
> instead of doing it at the distribution level? Also see:
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html
>
> Regards,
> Petteri
>
>