Import X env variables (DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY) inside user service

[q3cpma]

Hello, title is quite explicit, I came from https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967200#c7 after finding that these two environment variables are needed by the dunst user service at least on X11.

The issue of course being that xinit/startx aren't user services so they can't pass their exported env vars via depend() to other services.

[charles-benedito]

hmm, the env gets filtered on purpose. in user mode the built in allowlist is just USER, LOGNAME, HOME, SHELL, XDG_* and a few editor/pager vars, so DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY are dropped before the service script even runs:

openrc/src/shared/misc.c

Lines 70 to 74 in 14e11b7

	static const char *const usrenv_allowlist[] = {
	"USER", "LOGNAME", "HOME", "SHELL",
	"XDG_*", "DIFFTOOL", "LESS", "PAGER",
	"EDITOR", "VISUAL", NULL
	};

the escape hatch is rc_env_allow (L97 in the same file), which in user mode is read from ~/.config/rc/rc.conf. put rc_env_allow="DISPLAY XAUTHORITY" there, then start dunst from inside the x session, eg rc-service -U dunst start at the end of .xinitrc, since whatever pam_openrc launched at login never had a DISPLAY to hand over anyway. the lazier route is export DISPLAY=:0 in ~/.config/rc/conf.d/dunst (conf.d gets sourced by the script), but XAUTHORITY depends on how ur startx sets things up, so i'd go with the allowlist. lmk if that works

[q3cpma]

I'll try it soon. Though even if it works, this doesn't look as clean as the systemd solution, so this question might warrant some brainstorming on ways to solve it "properly" (xinit as user service?).

[q3cpma]

It works fine here, and even if I don't get automatic startup via OpenRC, I still get the advantages of supervise-daemon.

But that means that every service started from the CLI now gets DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY...

[navi-desu]

xinit as user service?

this would be the proper way to do it, specially since openrc 0.64 has a reexport dependency type, which is made for having services declaratively share environment variables

i have not tested making Xorg into a service, though

[q3cpma]

I still think the general need for user services to get access to these two variables is quite an important and unsolved problem.