On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 09:48:11AM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 11/03/2019 à 19:33, KatolaZ a écrit :
> > guys, anything using dbus will most probably (indirectly) access
> > /var/lib/dbus/machine-id at some point in time, since that file is
> > read when attempting to send a message via dbus.
>
>     It's most certainly as simple as that.
>
>     The question is why the hell do a web browser need to attach to Dbus?
> This question is pure rant because I won't be satisfied by any answer.

In order to contact your preferred DE's interface to select the
printer when you hit CTRL+P, just to make one example out of several
dozens? Or to unlock the keyring using your DE's keyring manager?

We can only fear what we don't understand.

I know it should seem obvious today, but interaction among different
applications requires Inter-Process Communication (IPC). This is done
in the GNOME-world throgh CORBA, and in the KDE-world throug DCOP (and
in the Micro$oft world through DCOM). The proposal of freedesktop was
to have a unified interface for that. The result is called dbus, and
it's not that much different in spirit and functioning from either
CORBA or DCOP or DCOM (also CORBA needs the equivalent of machine-id
for most operations, just to mention one similarity). In other words,
if you use a "modern" DE, you have been using such complicated IPC
mechanisms for the best part of the last 20+ years. It's not new. It
has been there for ages. Maybe it was called differently, but it had
basically the same ugly face for programmers, and the same "nice"
behaviour from the user perspective.

I don't particularly like dbus, as I don't particularly like CORBA or
DCOP (I have actually written a relatively large piece of software
based on CORBA in the past, but I have no large experience of DCOP
TBH). IMHO, IPC does not need to be that complicated, if programmers
know their way around. On top of that, dbus seems to be much slower
than either CORBA or DCOP, so it's not even a technological
improvement. It's the same shit we have been dealing with for the last
20 years.

We can surely live happy without such complicated IPC frameworks, and
I have personally done that for many years now. But seriously, it
looks to me like we are still shooting the wrong bird here. If you
don't trust CORBA/DCOP/dbus, just remove any GNOME/KDE/whatever
component from your system. It's possible. Then, you won't have any
"desktop integration" which seems to be a "must" for many users today,
but I can assure that life goes on either way.

We can only fear what we don't understand.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - Devuan -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
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