WIP: https://github.com/swagtoy/gnome-session-openrc/tree/independence should be possible to adapt or extend it to support other user service systems as well.

Doesn't void use runit still? Do you guys thing that's going to be reliable for this, because I don't recall that having user services. Without those, most efforts are going to be a pain, unless you have a trick up your sleeve I'm unaware of

Do you guys thing that's going to be reliable for this, because I don't recall that having user services.

You can pretty easily do user services in runit by creating a runsvdir for the user when they login. (That's what the runit backend for turnstile does.)

The part that makes runit problematic in this case is that it doesn't support dependencies. (e.g. in the runit turnstile backend, some features, such as signaling to dinit systemwide user services when a user session has been created, can't really be implemented through runit. Even for system services, we basically use the fact that runit is single threaded and will retry starting a service multiple times to work around ordering issues. For example, the gdm service "depends" on dbus by simply erroring out if dbus hasn't been started yet. Runit doesn't know that gdm depends on dbus, just that it failed to start and can be tried again later.)

That being said, we don't technically need to use runit to manage the gnome session services (it is already not using runit for that), and some systems like dinit and shepherd support being run as usermode process supervision daemons alongside another init system.

I've never been a runit fan for this reason :)

I'd personally encourage some other init system but I doubt i can wade my way on that. I just remember messing with void many many moons ago and finding runit's simplicity to be a pain point than a killer.

But I'm no boss. Just my 2c. I couldn't personally see how runit wouldve worked for this, which is why i asked the question. Good luck though!

One thing to note, I was able to use gnome-session-shepherd: https://gitlab.gnome.org/noe/gnome-session-shepherd
It is currently targeting GNOME 48 though, it is a full reimplementation rather than just the leader (probably not desirable since the D-Bus API only depends on logind), and it doesn't fully implement the D-Bus API so it isn't much better than just using gnome-session 48 ATM, but it does work.

gnome-session-shepherd

could you share the template and explain how you made it work?

could you share the template and explain how you made it work?

Again, it has issues that aren't present with gnome-session 48 so I don't reccomend it ATM, although I pushed it to the gsession-shepherd branch if you are curious.

It uses guile-ini to reimplement the old .desktop based service manager, but with modern service management and monitoring with shepherd (which can be controlled with the gherd script).

I did notice issues with scaling being broken when using it though, although I haven't looked into that yet.
It also specifically looks for the the .desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart and not /usr/share/applications so you might have to symlink them (specifically org.gnome.Shell.desktop).

Edit: the scaling issues are caused by the unimplemented RegisterClient D-Bus API, which causes gsd-xsettings to fail to start.

I pushed it here

thanks! i looked at gnome-session-shepherd during gnome 48-49 transition. it was still untagged back then, but i got stuck building one of the deps, i think.