D-BUS required changes in KDE 4

[Thiago Macieira]

There are two things I have found out during my port of kdelibs to D-BUS 
that we will have to address:

1) Currently, the D-BUS session daemon isn't automatically started. This 
requires the user to have his scripts set up to start the daemon *before* 
any KDE application is started. For a KDE session, we can fix that with 
startkde, but imagine a user running KMail in TWM: KMail will refuse to 
start.

2) Also, there's no way for a program with a different UID to connect to 
the session bus. So kdesu loses functionality.

For #1, there has been a discussion in the D-BUS mailing list of a 
possible solution. It has not been implemented so far. So I have to ask: 
do we mandate starting the bus daemon, or should we push for the 
autostarter solution?

For #2, there is currently no solution. The only way for applications to 
communicate with each other using D-BUS if they don't have the same UID 
is to use the system bus (not the user's session bus).

The implications of this is that you cannot have things like KCMs running 
as root. The solution for that would be to decouple the GUI part from the 
actual worker part: there would be a small worker program that would be 
run as root and would communicate with the GUI via the system bus.

In the future, we can also investigate using PolicyKit as a 
replacement/complement for kdesu. It appears HAL will use it anyways, so 
we may have to have a front-end for PolicyKit.
-- 
Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  thiago.macieira (AT) trolltech.com     Trolltech AS
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