so the kernel can send d-bus messages

[Havoc Pennington]

On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 21:10, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> Let me point again at:
> http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/dbus/2004-July/001301.html

I'm really talking about the system bus here, and the case of restarting
it, not the case of it crashing or the case of the session bus.

For the session bus it is the single special process that should define
the scope of the session and track the lifecycle of other processes.
There is no reliable way to track the lifecycle of the bus itself, you
need a "grounding point" that is assumed to never crash. Thus crash
recovery or restart for the session bus will kill the session and is not
supposed to happen.

The obvious grounding point is the X server, but for various reasons
people don't want to require X for everything in the session, so we need
a second grounding point, and that is dbus-daemon.

> This leads to more general question - as I'd REALLY like to get rid of
> env vars for that type of settings, where is the correct place to find
> people interested in (and more importantly, capable of) doing that?

As far as I know, your problem here is not lack of people, but lack of
feasibility. You can't have a swarm of processes that magically
associate with each other. There has to be something that associates
them into a session. That thing is dbus-daemon, in a dbus world.

Right now (for a GNOME session) the answer is gnome-session and the X
server. And guess what, they both use an environment variable. ;-)

For the system bus, it isn't a "grounding point" or "session definition"
because the kernel plays that role instead.

Havoc