I almost tagged this off-topic but it's directed toward ordinary
Debian
users (with developer backgrounds). I first raised this on
modular-debian but I want to get some ideas from a wider audience.
I'm starting to get familiar with Plan 9 and D-Bus, to compare how
they
try to solve the same set of problems.
Plan 9 concepts attempt to solve Unix problems in a very different
way than Opendesktop.org. For people wanting to return to the
original
Unix concepts, 9p/plumber (or an updated version) seems like a
natural
fit going forward, for basic IPC purposes. 9p is already in Linux,
and
probably could be ported to the other Debian ports.
I realize I just have to convince millions of people to re-plumb
their
core OS in a short period of time, but recent history teaches us that
it
that this is entirely feasible! Thus emboldened, I would even deign
to give users a choice in the matter, but realistically, this would
probably be an experimental project.
Could an IPC bridge/shim mechanism connect to a new IPC model while
apps
and DE's migrate from D-Bus, or support both optionally? I can see an
updated version of Plumber might be needed, and things might be
simplified by other aspects of the Plan 9 paradigm, like per-process
namespaces and treating everything as a file.