Starting session might fail without package "procps"
Specific example:
On distribution postmarketOS I installed package calls
(a phone application). Two reboots later, the Xfce4 session fails to start and returns to the display manager.
What happens:
postmarketOS is based on distribution Alpine Linux [1], which is build around musl libc and busybox. On installation of calls
, it is added to autostart. After the first reboot, calls
starts a daemon. By default, at the Xfce4 shutdown/reboot dialog the option "Save session for future logins" is set. Saving the restart command for running programs is done by ps -p %u -o args=
[2]. Busybox doesn't have the option "-p" in its ps
command [3]. Therefore the line RestartCommand (and line Program) remains empty in file ~/.config/sessions/xfce4-session-HOSTNAME:0. When rebooting a second time, this empty line leads to xfce4-session failing to start.
Snippet from file ~/.config/sessions/xfce4-session-hostname:0:
Client6_ClientId=org.gnome.Calls
Client6_Hostname=hostname
Client6_RestartCommand=
Client6_DesktopFile=/usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Calls.desktop
Client6_Program=
Workaround:
I will set up a merge request at Alpine Linux to set package "procps" as a dependency of xfce4-session. This package contains the full-featured ps
command [4].
Points I want to raise:
- Maybe there are other distros running on busybox or other reasons why xfce4-session should run reliably without package "procps".
- Even if package "procps" isn't installed and a RestartCommand line remains empty, this shouldn't lead to xfce4-session failing to start. I would expect just the program not starting. This would confuse the user as well but would be less severe.
OS/software:
- Distribution: postmarketOS (based on Alpine Linux)
- xfce4-session version: 4.16.0
References: