setsid2(sid) proposal - assign current process to existing session
From: Devin Bayer
Date: Tue Aug 04 2020 - 09:11:19 EST
Hello,
I'm wondering about the possibility of introducing a new system call for
moving a process to an existing session. If `sid` is an existing session
with the same owner as the current process, one could call:
setsid2(sid)
This would have similar behavior to setpgid(), and would probably
effectively call setpgid() internally too.
The use case is for something like `flatpak-spawn --host`, which allows
you to launch a program in an outer namespace from an inner namespace.
It behaves as a child of the caller but is actually a child of an
external daemon.
It works by connecting stdin/out/err to those of the caller, for example
a PTY for xterm running in the inner namespace. This works fine for
non-interactive programs, but it's impossible for the spawned task to
share the controlling TTY with the shell running in xterm.
I can't see where the problems are, though I'm surprised such
functionally doesn't yet exist. Because it deals with such basic
concepts, I'm wondering if such a change will even be considered.
There is a workaround; one can create a new PTY on the host and copy the
I/O streams manually. Not ideal, but okay.
Any comments welcome.
Cheers
~ dev