Hi Paul, Joshua, Philipp,

Philipp, Joshua thank you for the code review and for the insights
regarding weston and weston-init. In the long term, discussing
modifications to weston and weston-init probably makes sense. However, for
the moment, I think my single-line change to add pam to the defaults is
simple and makes sense, especially considering that this fix is also
suitable for cherry-picking to release Wrynose.

Paul, following your initial code review, could you please have a look at
the third iteration of this patch? I would appreciate your feedback on
whether any additional modifications on my side are necessary to get it
merged in the upstream.

Please note that my modification through DISTRO_FEATURES_DEFAULTS targets
the nodistro and the yocto-check-layer use case. I consider this change to
be safe because in my opinion Poky or custom distributions are expected to
define an explicit DISTRO_FEATURES. So (most) other cases will remain
unaffected by this adjustment of the defaults.

Thanks, Leon

On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 11:30 PM Joshua Watt <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 2:45 AM Philipp Zabel via lists.openembedded.org
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Mi, 2026-07-08 at 17:37 +0300, Leon Anavi wrote:
>> > Add pam to DISTRO_FEATURES_DEFAULTS in init-manager-systemd.inc.
>> > This way pam will available if variable VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager
>> > has been set to systemd. Otherwise having systemd in conjunction
>> > with wayland but without pam leads to a conflict with the
>> > REQUIRED_DISTRO_FEATURES for weston related recipes.
>>
>> I think these requirements are partially incorrect, btw.
>>
>> Weston itself only requires PAM for the VNC password, so if
>> PACKAGECONFIG[vnc] is disabled, there is no PAM dependency from
>> weston_15.0.1.bb at all, and if vnc is enabled, the PAM dependency has
>> nothing to do with systemd being enabled or used as init system.
>>
>> The PAM dependency in weston-init.bb comes from the PAMName=weston-
>> autologin option in weston.service and the corresponding weston-
>> autologin PAM configuration. Those files are always installed if
>> DISTRO_FEATURES has systemd, even if VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager is
>> set to something else.
>> Shouldn't either the pam distro feature depend on the systemd distro
>> feature, or should the weston.service/weston-autologin files be
>> installed at all if the systemd distro feature is enabled but
>> init_manager is set to something else?
>> I think it wouldn't be even better to remove the PAM requirement from
>> weston-init if VNC is disabled, as Weston doesn't need the PAM login in
>> that case.
>>
>
> I believe weston-init needs PAM regardless of VNC being enabled.
>
> The intention of weston-init is to provide a minimal setup to start weston
> on boot and not run as root (since that's a huge pain). There are
> certainly other ways of starting weston (such as a login manager), but this
> one has been around for a while and is nice because it "just works" even on
> devices with no keyboard for (e.g. a user login in a login manager), has a
> good security model (not running as root), aside from PAM has almost no
> dependencies, and is quite simple. IMHO, It works well for an embedded
> device because you can set the weston shell to the kiosk shell and
> immediately start your application as a client to show your UI, but it's
> not really great for a "desktop" experience (but I never found that a
> useful experience on an embedded device outside of demonstration purposes).
> It's more or less a copy of a similar system I use in my day job and I had
> lofty goals of removing our version for the upstream one, but I'm beginning
> to think this is an unrealistic goal.
>
> Regardless, if we continue to use weston-init, we probably need PAM by
> default - not because of weston, but because of weston-init. Alternatively,
> we can do something other than weston-init, but I don't really have any
> idea what that should be, what it would take to switch, or how useful it
> would be in the real world.
>
>
>
>>
>> regards
>> Philipp
>>
>> 
>>
>>
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