[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and EatDirt at 07/03/12 10:18 did gyre and gimble:
> On 07/03/12 10:26, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Unless someone comes along and does a reasonable amount of coding before
>> mga2, I think we'll have to deprecate supporting startx (it can still be
>> used in some circumstances, but audio and accelerated graphics will not
>> be available).
>>
>> See this comment (and the link therein) for more info on the issue:
>> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4652#c9
> 
> 
> Hi there,
> as many, I don't understand (yet, it not ever) systemd :)
> But what do you mean?

systemd tracks and manages user sessions. i.e. it takes over the role of
console-kit which had many design flaws and generally makes a good job
of managing sessions properly without any nasty hacks or work arounds.

> An user could no longer starts in runlevel 3 and start an X session
> directly ? This is the way we actually debug X, that sounds very
> unreasonable to me.

Users can still technically run startx, but the user session will not be
seen as active and thus all sorts of things break with regards to
setting ACLs on device nodes - e.g. on /dev/snd/* /dev/dri/* etc. Other
things relating to session management will also likely break.

You can still debug X but only for an actual X server.

Anyway even when I was maintaining X a few years back, I don't think I
ever started it from the text console. I always used the official
methods for starting X (service dm restart in those days). So not sure
it's really all that needed for debugging.


Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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