User bus conclusion

[Matthew Johnson]

On Wed Nov 10 12:22, Havoc Pennington wrote:
 
> The proposal today, though, is new and I like it a lot: a per-user
> singleton session. That seems to simplify things *and* solve new
> problems.
>
> I feel like this thread is kinda mixing up the two issues. The thing I
> took away as the heart of the original email you guys posted, was
> per-user sessions. I love that. I think they have zip to do with user
> buses.

Whether or not to allow more that one login for the same user is not something
which it is up to us to decide. Whether or not you think it's a good idea
(sure, it's _simpler_, I guess we should just give up on anything that's
slightly hard, right?), but D-Bus cannot make this decision for people.

If we want to be a universal component of the operating system - which I
believe we do - and not just 'some gnome/kde piece that restricts their apps
from playing well with others', we can't go making arbitrary restrictions and
breaking existing use cases.

> > There's this certain "DBus is difficult for developers" urban myth
> > that's been floating around, and I'm not really sure that it's true.
> 
> Personally I think some things need to be defined as not allowed, and
> then other ways of accomplishing the same goals that are more
> tractable (such as rootless X servers, frontends that run as one user
> and talk to a system backend, VNC instead of remote X apps, stuff like
> that) will emerge.

Sure, people will hack around you when you break things, but that's not an
excuse for breaking them because you can't come up with a real solution.

Whether or not the solution is complicated is not a good reason not to do it.
Complexity should be hidden, yes, but not avoided. People generally don't use
D-Bus directly. They use libnotify, libhal, libgconf or whatever - and those
will hide which bus is being used, hide the complexity without removing it
and breaking user stories.

Matt
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