dbus-1.2.3 and gnome-settings-daemon-2.24.1

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 6:29 PM, Havoc Pennington
<havoc.pennington at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:48 PM, walt <w41ter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few of us using gentoo-unstable/testing are having trouble with gsd not
>> starting properly unless we use 'dbus-launch gnome-session'.
>>
>
> It's a bug if any distribution launches a desktop without launching
> dbus-daemon first.
>
> As Ray said gnome-session makes some sort of (broken and wrong)
> attempt to recover, but it's broken and wrong. The bug is in the X
> session startup scripts that fail to launch dbus. The entire X session
> needs to see the dbus daemon and it needs to start before anything
> else in the session, including gnome-session. Also dbus should be
> launched for all sessions, not just gnome, because a number of apps
> require it and any session can contain those apps.
>
> Personally I think it would be clearer if gnome-session just did
> g_error("Your X setup scripts are broken because dbus-daemon was not
> launched") if it got a NULL session bus.

I see the gnome-session patch as in a similar vein as the current
autospawning code - a last ditch attempt for "legacy" situations.
Here's a random example:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-tutorials-howtos-reference-material/971-installing-running-vnc-redhat-rpm-linux.html

The tutorial tells you to just run "gnome-session" in the script,
which *used* to work.  Should VNC run dbus-session?  Well, it's
debatable and gets into the whole mess of multiple logins for a
particular uid.  Should all things be updated to run "dbus-launch
gnome-session".  Probably.  But the gnome-session patch does that
automatically, at the cost of a small speed hit.

But definitely in the normal case the OS vendor should have set up the
session bus as part of the login.