dbus - remote

[John Palmieri]

It is a security, complexity and scope decision.  D-Bus was written for desktop communication where you have reliable connections such as domain sockets.  While there is a TCP/IP transport, connections to a bus via this mechanism is out of scope of the original intent of D-Bus.  D-Bus as a protocol is itself not adequate enough for use on unreliable networks.  There is no rate limiting, no transmission acknowledgments/guarantees, and no priority dispatching.  Adding these to the protocol would unnecessarily complicate it for its main use case, the desktop.  For this stuff you would be best to either bridge another protocol (there is some examples of D-Bus to REST for social services) or use a wrapper protocol like Telepathy Tubes which simply sends the D-Bus packet out as payload data to their own robust protocol (XMPP).  Personally I am working with AMQP these days for network messaging.  Its complexity and flexibility make it ideal for messaging over a network but it would make a horrible desktop bus.
  
----- "Glenn Schmottlach" <glenn.schmottlach at harman.com> wrote:

> I believe this is/was a security decision. There is no easy way to
> authenticate and authorize the application that is attempting to
> connect to the daemon from the outside. If you are on a "trusted"
> network then this may not apply (that's the environment I work in). I
> agree, this approach has a great deal of potential and is how I use it
> with an embedded system for debug and testing out-side the target
> environment.
> 
> Glenn
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dbus-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org
> [mailto:dbus-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf Of Roberto
> -MadBob- Guido
> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:15 AM
> To: dbus at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: dbus - remote
> 
> On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 13:40 +0100, Peter Würtz wrote:
> > Unfortunately there seems to be no general interest in this IMO
> very
> > powerful use case
> > 
> I agree: on those days it is common to have many PCs connected on the
> same LAN (a laptop, a modern smartphone, a desktop, perhaps an home
> server...), be able to share each other data and RPCs throught the
> well
> know DBUS API will untap many opportunities.
> 
> Is there any "official" reason for which this option was never be
> integrated in the mainstream codebase? Lack of proper testing of the
> already existing patches? Lack of interest in this feature? Lack of
> resources to maintain that?
> 
> -- 
> Roberto -MadBob- Guido
> http://claimid.com/madbob
> 
> 
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-- 
--
John (J5) Palmieri
Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.