[arch-general] [OT] What is wrong with DBus anyway?

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 12/03/2009 12:29 PM, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> Mechanisms have existed for like 20 years before dbus to communicate
> with other programs. dbus is just another way to do it that has a
> smell of "architecture astronomy" - as if they all scoffed at the
> actual ways to do IPC on various Unicies and said "Oh, I can design
> better".
> 
> That's why I dislike it.

I'll preface this by right up front saying that my knowledge of dbus is 
actually pretty limited.  So forgive me if I'm off-base in my comments.

But frankly, I didn't think the *intent* behind dbus was as a 
replacement for IPC.  As I understood it, dbus was intended to be a 
system-wide message bus - i.e., a very generic pub/sub type of system 
that could be used by any component in the system.  Some components 
would publish messages of a particular, and other components would get 
notified about messages of a type they're interested in and react to them.

Makes some sense to me to do things this way, as then you can just have 
a single, standard system-wide daemon that every app interacts with in 
the same way, rather than force each app to reinvent the wheel and 
implement their own solution.

DR