dbus / mbus (was Re: glib in kdesupport: yes or no?)

[Maks Orlovich]

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 01:24 pm, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 March 2003 03:11, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > political reasons. maybe we can leverage this into Apache and other
> > projects by making it an inescapable de facto standard." that's reading
> > between the lines, i know, but that's how it comes off.
>
> Yes, but such a protocol is needed. Few few examples why:
>
> - system-wide notifications. For many purposes a application should be
> notified of a system event. When the user attachs a printer to the system
> the desktop should help the user to configure it, or when a user attachs a
> joystick while a game is running the game should recognize and use it
> immediately without the need of a restart. The linux-hotplug(.sf.net) group
> talked about the need of a centralized server for thing like this, but so
> far nobody came up with a solution. 

There are already solutions for this in i.e. Mandrake. Using nothing but 
simple scripting. There is no need for any sort of a system-wide bus for 
this, either, since the notifications are done by the root user, which can 
certainly become any user it wants to, IIRC.

> - offering centralized services to applications. Right now we have at least
> 4 HTTP servers in KDE CVS: kpf, kxmlrpcd, saape and the one for krfb
> (actually a shell script for kinetd). If a system is running several users
> in a thin-client setup there's a huge number of servers running that all
> need to allocate ports and make many things complicated. Many things would
> be easier if there was only one http server running that offers users and
> their application a part of its namespace.

Interesting scenario, but this starts getting a security nightmare. Do you 
really want to have your apache server running with httpd user permissions 
talking to your desktop? What is the security policy in this case? How do you 
limit the traffic you want from the traffic you don't?  If there is more than 
one user involved this is definitely breaking the user security/permissions 
sandbox. Could it be made secure? Probably. Is there a possibility of 
mistakes? Yes. And if you're running as a single user, something like DCOP, 
user-wide bus is enough.