On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 07:02:29PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:

[cut]

> > 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?
> >
>     Is dbus really necessary for that? When printing from Palemoon, the same
> dialog as all applications pops up, I guess it has to do with CUPS, but
> Palemoon doesn't read machine-id for that, which certainly means it doesn't
> use Dbus.
>

It is not necessary, but developers are using it :)


> > Or to unlock the keyring using your DE's keyring manager?
> >
>     I, personally, don't trust that keyring. So don't use.
>

I don't use it either, but that's not the point. If an application has
support for a feature, and that feature is cut around libWhatever, you
need to link libWhatever in. And if libWhatever needs to contact
serviceWhatever, it must be working properly before the app start,
because an application cannot know in advance whether you will print a
document or not...

I need to keep libdbus installed only because surf uses libwxgtk,
which in turns depends on libgtk2, which in turn uses something else
that is linked against libdbus. Go figure...

> > We can only fear what we don't understand.
> >
>     Sure, and I thank you for having looked at Dbus' source. What we don't
> understand still is the reason for this new /etc/machine-id. One will need
> to read Systemd's source to know it.
>

/etc/machine-id has literally *nothing* to do with dbus. It comes from
systemd, and is not present in any genuine Devuan install. You can
remove it and apparently no application will be affected in Devuan.

>
> > If you don't trust CORBA/DCOP/dbus, just remove any GNOME/KDE/whatever
> > component from your system.
> >
>     I dislike them and I'm aiming to get rid of them. Xfce needs gvfs (and
> what else) to show icons for removable disks. I'm writing an application
> sans-gvfs do do something similar.
>

Great. Welcome to the club :)

> > 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.
> >
>     Well, this is meant to make the famous "Linux Desktop" look like MacOS
> or MSWindows to take a part of their market share.
>
>     I got the impression that a significant part of devuaneers is running
> big servers and another part DIY desktop/laptops. The first of these
> populations easily keep away from this entanglement; the last may be unhappy
> with it.
>

That's only part of the story. There are also a lot of D1rs who just
use Devuan as their standard desktop. They are not interested in
tinkering, and they just want to use their computer with a reasonable
distribution. There are Devuan installations which run as public
kiosks, and more that power high school and university labs. In all
these cases, Devuan must *just work*.

If Devuan was just "big servers", we would have dropped most of what
most of us consider "nonsense" since from the beginning. But Devuan
aims at providing a universal, dependable, stable, free operating
system. There are many more use-cases out there than anyone of us
alone can imagine, and we need to support as many of them as possible,
if we want Devuan to survive and thrive ;)

>     This said, the job of providing a sans-dbus  DE is certainly not
> something I would ask to Devuan. But there are people in the Devuan
> community who aim at that. They need a sans-systemd OS like Devuan to do it.
>

And derivatives are welcome to do that, if they like.

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  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]