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

[Jan de Groot]

On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 19:14 +0100, Arvid Picciani wrote:
> > Mechanisms have existed for like 20 years before dbus to communicate
> > with other programs.
> 
> and those don't require a user space daemon. 

You're talking crap. Examples of other IPC frameworks are bonobo and
dcop. Both launched the daemon on initial usage. On a modern GNOME
desktop you still have a bonobo-activation-server running because
evolution still uses it.

Dbus also launches a sesion bus when it's needed, but for the system
bus, things are different. You can't run a system bus as normal user,
unless you install dbus as setuid root and make some code to launch the
system bus on request.

One thing I hate about dbus is the fact that a lot of applications crash
together with shutdown of dbus. gnome-session and xfce terminal come to
mind. I think gnome-session has been fixed for this, xfce terminal has a
patch in our svn for it. I don't mind if xfce terminal can't open new
tabs or windows when dbus goes down, but please don't kill the ones that
are open. This is not actually a bug in dbus, but an issue with
applications using it.