Re: Proposed mass bug filing: use and misuse of dbus-launch (dbus-x11)

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2016 at 18:02:32 +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
> > Is that really up-to the individual application to declare a
> > dependency
> > against dbus-user-session | dbus-x11 ?
>
> At the moment: yes. A dependency on dbus-x11 (in jessie) or on
> dbus-user-session | dbus-x11 (now) can be used to signify "this
> application or library is useless without a working session bus".
> Apps that rely on Telepathy, Tracker or the Evolution servers are
> good examples of a legitimate dependency on the session bus.
>
> Depending on dbus is not enough: that only guarantees working D-Bus
> binaries (so you have all the right bits to get a session bus, but some
> assembly is required) and a working system bus.
>
> The only other ways I can think of right now to express that requirement
> are:
>
> * introduce a metapackage "dbus-session" with that dependency, and
>   ask these apps to depend on it, or on dbus-session | dbus-x11 to be
>   nice to backports;
[...]
> The last time this changed was the introduction of dbus-x11 in 2007;
> twice in a decade isn't bad. I don't think it's necessarily going to
> change again any time soon (unless we do a transition to
> dbus-x11 | dbus-user-session and then another to
> dbus-user-session | dbus-x11, which is why I'd prefer not to do that
> two-stage approach).

I can think of another reason that this might change: if we introduce an
(experimental, and eventually non-experimental) variant based on a
future stable version of kdbus.

If we need to go through this transition anyway, could we please go
ahead and introduce a dbus-session-bus package for other packages to
depend on, to allow for potential future transitions or experiments?

- Josh Triplett