Steve Litt wrote:

>Does dunst depend on dbus?

Well, according to apt-cache depends, it needs dbus' shared library
(libdbus-1-3).

>Can dunst be run without dbus?
>Can notify-send be run without dbus?

Since it doesn't depend on dbus package, which contains
dbus-daemon, it may be able to.

Not sure, whether having libdbus-1-3 is a concern.
dbus(-dev) is required for building. libdbus-1-3 itself doesn't
needdbus.

>I'd be a lot more open to using notifications if they could be
>completely independent of dbus.

In case you want to try something else, there are also
statnot [1] and twmn [2].
statnot requires dbus-python for building; twmn
is used in tiling window managers.

From what I understand, all these nofication daemons simply rely on
dbus' shared library but does not require dbus-daemon & Co. to run.

[1]: https://github.com/halhen/statnot
[2]: https://github.com/sboli/twmn


My two cents,
Linux Mitt