GNOME session OpenRC service manager support

[fossdd]

A few months and a GNOME release now passed since gnome-session removed support for their legacy service management, and I think it would be nice to reflect now how to support OpenRC service management for gnome-session.

There also have been some thoughts in https://social.vlhl.dev/notice/Ay3B4dGZlSwGgQKUqm.

Downstream issue in Alpine Linux: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/17514

[navi-desu]

there is https://github.com/swagtoy/gnome-session-openrc/ which seems to be working, though i'm yet to look deeply into it (promised i would but couldn't manage to yet)

it does have a lot of rough edges, quite a few upstream features are needed to sand those down, #782 and #935 to name a few

CC: @swagtoy

[swagtoy]

Hello! :) The rough edges have mostly been worked around, but yes, getting #782 merged is a huge helper that would let me remove a few hardcoded ENV hacks. Otherwise, everything works, I'm typing from a gnome session right now.

Nothing in particular needs to actually be done to OpenRC, since the gnome-session stuff mainly in relies on any sort of user daemon, which OpenRC happily provides. There is a shell script hack I need to write so I can remove my 1 liner hack to gsm-manager.c, completely obliterating the dependency on upstream gnome-session altogether, though ideally something special added to supervise-daemon could help too...

Regarding Alpine (and postmarketOS), now, I do have more stuff planned for that. I talked with Adrian a bit and I need to simply add meson tag support, that way you can install upstream gnome-session without the systemd related stuff (which is basically just 2 binaries), then the Alpine/PostmarketOS people can simply provide a gnome-session-openrc package which installs the required gnome-session-init-worker and gnome-session-ctl files for working with OpenRC.

Funny enough, gnome-session on OpenRC is actually better than it is on Systemd, for example, if gnome shell crashes, instead of kicking you back to GDM, it will happily restart gnome-shell, thanks to supervise-daemon. I will probably add some openrc settings you can set to control that behavior though.

I'm happy to discuss anything else if you have any questions :)