I personally think dbus is largely a wheel re-invented--not necessarily due
to incompetence on its developers' parts, mind you, but more due to mission
and scope creep over the past 12 years. If inter-process communication
could be done all over again from scratch, knowing what we use dbus for
these days, we'd probably be using FUSE or 9P or loopback NFS or some other
filesystem-like mechanism. Dbus objects and methods are already organized
into a directory hierarchy, and it implements its own permissions and
authentication mechanisms for controlling access from other processes.
With a bit of refactoring, I'll bet most dbus-speaking applications could
be turned into userspace API filesystems with little modification to their
core logic (kind of like how Plan 9 processes have their own private
filesystems).

-Jude

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Nate Bargmann <n0nb@???> wrote:

> * On 2015 25 Feb 10:03 -0600, Godefridus Daalmans wrote:
> > Personally I consider task #2 to do a little discovery and documenting of
> > what kinds of "middle-ware" I have on my Linux box and how it all
> interacts
> > (things like: what is akonadi/nepomuk/colord/avahi and do I need all of
> > that).
>
> Unless one is running KDE (whatever they call it these days),
> akonadi/nepomuk are not an issue. colord is billed as a means to manage
> color profiles--it is not installed on my Sid box although libcolord2 is
> installed to satisfy a dependency by libgtk-3-0. avahi implements a
> server for mdns, AIUI, and is needed by Pulse Audio to move sound over
> the network, for one example.
>
> > So I have a weird question for discussion, to study the *design* of dbus
> > together on this mailinglist with you lot who are probably a lot smarter
> > than me.
> >
> > Please be gentle and provide arguments if you think I'm talking crap :-)
> >
> > ============================
> > Why is there 1 dbus program (instead of 2 or 3)?
> > ============================
>
> Most likely because it has mostly been restrained to its problem domain
> and no one has been troubled enough by it to reimplement a replacement.
>
> After this I don't know enough to comment further but I find your
> thoughts interesting.
>
> - Nate
>
> --
>
> "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
> possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
>
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