Re: [tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2016-04-28 14:46 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
> 
>  > Given that I can start up everything I need in fvwm, I'm not sure I
>  > really need a session manager, but it sounds like if I'm going to go
>  > this route, I have to have one.
> 
> You don't need one if your apps normally save their own state, and you
> don't care if the running apps persist across reboots.

So do I just remove /usr/bin/x-session-manager then, and the standard
startup routines will work ok?

> You'll need a personal ~/.xinit or ~/.Xsession, and you'll need to
> hard-code your preference for such applications (or you could create a
> ~/.local/etc/alternatives, but that seems like overkill), that's all.

I was working with this earlier statement from you:

> *If* you provide your own .xinitrc or .Xsession, that will completely
> replace the corresponding system script, but that's rarely necessary.

So, you're basically saying that this is one of those situations? (If
so, fair enough.)

>  > I could be extremely happy with systemd (it's a very well done
>  > piece of software); is anybody using that for user sessions, yet?
> 
> I'd never heard of it -- after all, it's really designed for operating
> system services rather than user applications.

Not exactly. I'm not sure how much of this was in their original idea,
but at this point they've had separate user systemd instances available
for a long time, and they're explicitly aiming at being able to use
systemd as a session manager for X11+whatever systems.

> But I don't need user level session management -- *I* am my session
> manager.

Well, you *can* do that, but honestly, having decent process supervision
is a wonderful thing, and when you throw in all the other good stuff
(not having to worry about whether your background process daemonizes
correctly, proper, reliable logging, inetd-like auto-start of apps
only when something talks to them, etc. etc.) it seems to me almost a
no-brainer, especially when you consider there's almost nothing extra to
learn beyond what you already had to learn to handle your system startup
and the like.

> However the Unix philosophy pushes in the direction of minimal
> assumptions....

Oh, so it was the MIT guys who were always writing programs that
sacrificed completeness, working in in 80% of cases and breaking in the
other 20%? :-)

>  > Most software developers and their managers, like most humans, are
>  > inherently hugely optimistic, and so thinking about failure modes
>  > is not something that they do well.
> 
> Who needs to *think*?

Anybody who wants to do something the simple way, rather than the easy
way. In my experience, doing something simply requires a lot of thought,
which nobody finds particularly easy, though some like the challenge.

> Just observe your own pratfalls and listen to your users. ;-)

Yeah, I'm not buying that one. I've seen too many people stack hacks on
top of hacks to fix their own pratfalls.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch