keychain does not work in kde-plasma running under upstart

[Andy Fawcett]

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 13.10
Release: 13.10

Running 13.10 on multiple machines, all with kde-plasma as the desktop environment. Some environments are clean 13.10 installs, some are upgrades from earlier versions.

keychain is enabled for users, to allow easier use of SSH keys. Keychain is enabled via .bash_profile

With this setup, the ssh-agent does not cache the passphrase. This worked fine with 13.04 and earlier.

After a LOT of digging deeper, I found that disabling upstart support for kde-plasma in /etc/upstart-xsessions and restarting the system makes it all work again.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

@Andy - this sounds like an environment issue - I have been using keychain from the outset on Ubuntu with an Upstart session init. Either .bash_profile is not being sources (Upstart only ever runs code via /bin/sh), or that script is being sourced, or the variables it sets are not being injected into the Upstart Session Inits environment (via 'initctl set-env -g var=value').

[Andy Fawcett (andy-athame)]

As one of the tests, I made a completely clean install of 13.10 (Ubuntu), and installed the kubuntu-desktop package. Enabled KDM as the default login manager.

Created the .bash_profile, with enough to execute keychain, and source the keychain output files.

#!/bin/bash
export SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ssh-askpass
keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
. ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh
export PATH=~/bin:$PATH
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
   source ~/.bashrc
fi

with kde-plasma as an upstart xsession, this is executed (keychain invokes the passphrase dialog), but the ssh-agent functionality does not work

with kde-plasma disabled from upstart, and running normally, it all works as expected.

I'm happy to try anything to get to the bottom of the problem.