This line in startx script: unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS which was introduced in commit c07501f69239e9c1448736ad7e689a2c3da49af9, breaks the new behaviour of pam_systemd which sets this environment variable to point to the user bus, so that applications relying on session bus do not need to spawn another instance and dbus-launch is no longer necessary. With this line, those applications won't work properly.
I allowed systemd to start the user session bus automatically, and found this very issue. The file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/80-dbus expects DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS to be set if the session bus is already started, otherwise it starts one. This file is a Gentoo addition with reference to https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77504 (solved before the mentioned xinit commit): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/sys-apps/dbus/dbus-1.10.12.ebuild#n205 Is using 'startx' completely frowned upon by upstream and it's a distribution responsibility to support it now? How much there is left of the motivation for c07501f69239e9c1448736ad7e689a2c3da49af9? I did not quite understand why it was done; you always run 'startx' from within a session and do not want it to create a new session (it cannot, even). I've been asking about not being able to run several independent sessions as the same user, to which I have been educated as "no, you cannot do that anyway". Should that commit be reverted as a whole, or should SESSION_MANAGER still be cleared? What's the upstream opinion on this issue?
(In reply to Pekka Paalanen from comment #1) > How much there is left of the motivation for > c07501f69239e9c1448736ad7e689a2c3da49af9? How much do I remember about a change I wrote eight years ago? Very little, I'm afraid. I assume I did it because it was necessary then. If it isn't anymore, great, take it out.
(In reply to Adam Jackson from comment #2) > (In reply to Pekka Paalanen from comment #1) > > > How much there is left of the motivation for > > c07501f69239e9c1448736ad7e689a2c3da49af9? > > How much do I remember about a change I wrote eight years ago? Very little, > I'm afraid. I assume I did it because it was necessary then. If it isn't > anymore, great, take it out. I do not understand why it would have ever been a good thing, so I cannot understand if it's safe to remove or not. It seems to hinder one thing, but I have no idea what removing it might break. Hence I'm hesitant to propose a patch to just remove it, especially as I'm not familiar with the session stuff. Ajax, can you remember if you were perhaps running startx from an X11 terminal to start a second "X session" in the past? Would that even be (have been) a valid use case? Or maybe some other use case?
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