>I would call signal(SIGHUP, mysignalhandler) to be an explicit ignoring of SIGHUP. But that doesn't explicitly ignore SIGHUP. You're explicitly handling it but from an outside perspective we don't know if your SIGHUP handler is supposed to be a no op, output some progress information, terminate the program in some special way or what. All the system knows is that it signaled your program and your program is still around 10 seconds later. In terms of your program, it hasn't taken any external action, hence not being explicit.

As for the Gnome project though, that's just an example. I'm talking about cases where the application should terminate upon receipt of SIGHUP but doesn't. That default isn't changing, the method to avoid the default action is. Back when SIGHUP was created all software that wanted to ignore it needed to make a handler to avoid the new default behavior. If you want to be able to kill misbehaving processes that were supposed to terminate on SIGHUP then the design needs to change. There's no way to fix this without making some breaking change.

As to requiring others to work with it, your distribution is the one that's making you do that. systemd upstream has had killuserprocesses for a while now. It's just a configure option when building systemd. It's not like your distro is having someone else build packages for them, setting appropriate config options is entirely on them. Some distros are building systemd with that on by default, and some aren't.