No way to run daemons on user session

[Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho]

Some daemons need to run on user session. and the current implementation run it on system session.

For example EDS it needs to connect to user dbus session.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

It is important to note that "user session" is not really universal. It
needs to be Upstart for Unity7/8 today, in the future it'll be systemd,
gnome-session for GNOME, etc. This means we really need an abstract way
for the individual sessions to implement what "user session"
is.##SELECTION_END##

[Jim Hodapp (jhodapp)]

This is also needed for media-hub-server since it has the same requirement as EDS does to connect to the user dbus session.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Right, the idea is that the snap.yaml has an abstract declaration of
what it wants, the assertion from Canonical says what it can get and
whether that is automatic, and then the snapd implementation for the
particular environment maps those to the specifics of init system or
security system.

Mark

[Jamie Bennett (jamiebennett)]

This was discussed yesterday and it seems it is a non-trivial amount of work to accomplish. Positive steps we can take in the short-term are to design the solution first over the next couple of weeks and try to schedule this work for later.

[Leo Arias (elopio)]

This might be a duplicate of bug #1617314.

[Leo Arias (elopio)]

Something like this was requested by syncthing:

"As for the daemon thing... We ship systemd files in the Debian package, for example. A user can start Syncthing for themselves by systemctl enable syncthing@jb or something like that. It'll then nicely autostart itself and just generally work, which is something that we otherwise get lots of questions about how to accomplish. :)

It appears that when I add the daemon: simple thing to the meta file, I get something like snap.syncthing.syncthingd.service which is a system level service running as root only, which does not help at all. Hence the question about how to integrate, if it's possible."

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

This should definitely be possible, +1

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

FYI, people may want to follow along in this thread: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snapcraft/2016-December/001993.html. AIUI, the designs are in place and the implementation should start soon by the team working on Ubuntu Personal.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

@thomas will you be working on this or do we need to find someone