Bringing forth runit integration regarding desktop environments

[Andrew Bower]

Hi Martin,

On Sat, Nov 09, 2024 at 01:40:38PM +0100, Martin Steigerwald wrote:

> Today I managed to take some time again and go about bringing forth runit
> integration.

Excellent!

> However I wonder about doing some work for desktop integration as well.

I wonder how much time (or more importantly, upload cycles) we have to get
improvements to runit viability into Trixie and what the highest priority
gaps are that could use help?

> And again I also wondered about pipewire integration as well. AFAIR
> according to some discussion about it this cannot really be handled as a
> system service, but needs to be tied to the user session, probably by
> DBUS activation.
> 
> Maybe what Alpine does there would be a good approach:
> 
> https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/community/pipewire/pipewire-launcher.sh
> 
> I believe I read from a Devuan user that this would work. But I did not
> find that mail anymore. So I am not completely sure where to integrate
> Pipewire startup properly.

Are you thinking of something from this thread? 

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5867

Following inspiration from there I went with a user runsvdir supervision
tree started by an XFCE application launcher. There are three pipewire
services that get started and log within the user's directory. This worked
well and got torn down on session exit:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=49574#p49574

However, it's a toy solution, not a proper one.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about dbus, login/seat/session
management or X session manager plumbing but a runit supervision tree
for users mapped to one of these entities would be appealing. (I don't
know if the systemd solution even uses correct mapping - does it work if
you have multiple 'heads' on your machine? Maybe no one cares!) On the
other hand, your X session manager already exercises a process
supervision role so is it really right to layer another one on top?

I wonder what ideas Lorenzo has up his sleeve for a general solution to
user runit supervision?

Yours,

Andrew