This is one of the best tear downs of dbus I've seen.

The thinking seems to be based purely on trends, e.g "You guys are going with dbus, right? OK let's do that." even if it makes no sense for the use case.

Every release OSes increase in size and complexity, and not all of that is down to extra hardware support and changing architectures. It's pretty much just feature greed, and lack of thought for quality.

In some cases distros will just go ahead and add support for dbus for things that don't need it, for example spacefm that supports auto-mounting without dbus but is built with it anyway.

The problem I have with dbus is it's exactly the same as systemd in model. It wants to take over the whole system. Browser, file manager, removable disks, printer, instant messenger, all plug into dbus and if not then they at least force support libraries for it.

​Thanks,

chillfan

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On 14 March 2018 9:54 AM, KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 05:45:54AM -0400, Menelaos Maglis wrote:
>
> > > Can't ask users about such
> > >
> > > tradeoffs, they will be annoyed and won't be able to answer. These days you
> > >
> > > can ask the printer via d-bus. The printer knows more about itself than its
> > >
> > > users know about it.
> >
> > D-Bus is used for communication between processes. So the configuration and operation of a printer is split between several different components, which use D-Bus to communicate with each other.
> >
> > I question this architecture. Why should an application need a system bus to pass messages between its own components? CUPS is not using D-Bus and is able to print to other printers; only HPLIP uses D-bus, so far as I am aware. Why not keep using the same method/interfaces that are proven for decades? What is the benefit? How are printers from other manufacturers supported?
>
> You should complain with the developers of hplip. The madness about
>
> using heavy frameworks for IPC seems contagious. For some reason,
>
> nobody can write a program that uses standard text interfaces any
>
> more.
>
> > Above architecture /may/ be beneficial to a number of use cases. E.g. interactive desktop users that want also a simple GUI tool in an integrated desktop environment. Imposing a hard dependency on an additional component (D-Bus) may not server other use cases well or at all if they cannot use D-Bus.
> >
> > So I am left with below choices:
> >
> > - Accept no printing
> > - Accept HPLIP+D-Bus if possible
> > - Fork and change HPLIP or develop something new to do the job, if I have the abilities/motivation.
> >
> > At least this is an option in free software world.
>
> The problem is that a huge fraction of Linux vendors still believe
>
> that "This is the year of Linux on desktops" (something we have been
>
> told since around 2005, I guess). Or they simply decide to cover up
>
> poor architecture designs by false promises.
>
> The result is that we are losing most of the original simplicity of
>
> Linux (effectively fucking up the only users who care about Linux),
>
> just to serve users that will never use Linux on their desktops
>
> anyway.
>
> HND
>
> KatolaZ
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> \[ ~.,_ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab \]
>
> \[ "+. katolaz \[at\] freaknet.org \-\-\- katolaz \[at\] yahoo.it \]
>
> \[ @) http://kalos.mine.nu \-\-\- Devuan GNU + Linux User \]
>
> \[ @@) http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia \-\- GPG: 0B5F062F \]
>
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