about using privileged (KAuth) helpers: system dbus daemon on OS X?

[Simon McVittie]

On 19/09/16 20:51, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
>> the normal behaviour expected by the users, so I'd advise against Polkit too.
> 
> Careful with that on the DBus ML, there are already enough people
> who advise against DBus on OS X or MS Windows too ;)

They are welcome to do so, and they are sometimes right.

The D-Bus maintainers do not have a political stake in getting D-Bus
used in places where it would be inappropriate. Indeed, we actively
*don't* want people using D-Bus where it isn't appropriate: that creates
more work for us and makes D-Bus look bad. If there is another
technology that is more suitable for your purposes than D-Bus, please
use that other technology.

D-Bus isn't intended to be the only IPC protocol you will ever need;
it's intended to be a reasonable 90%-solution IPC protocol that is
broadly useful, and stops people from reinventing too many wheels where
they didn't need to (partly to save the effort, and partly because those
new wheels often turn out to be square). As much as we like our wheel
design, sometimes what you actually need is a vehicle with caterpillar
tracks, skis or wings; that's fine, and you shouldn't persist in trying
to use our wheels in such situations.

D-Bus has two primary purposes:

* the session bus: be the standard IPC mechanism between user processes
  and per-user services on "the Free desktop" (GNOME, KDE, etc.,
  primarily on GNU/Linux, and secondarily on *BSD, Hurd and other Free
  Unix platforms), wherever there isn't a good reason to do
  something else

* the system bus: be the standard IPC mechanism between user processes
  and system services, and between one system service and the next, in
  desktop, server or "reasonably large" embedded environments,
  primarily on GNU/Linux and secondarily on *BSD, Hurd and other Free
  Unix platforms, again wherever there isn't a good reason to do
  something else

If people find D-Bus useful on proprietary Unix such as OS X and QNX, or
on non-Unix platforms such as Windows, that's great; we'll support those
as long as it isn't excessively difficult. However, that isn't among
D-Bus' primary goals, and if it interferes with D-Bus' primary goals, we
shouldn't do it.

Similarly, if people find D-Bus useful for buses that are neither the
session bus nor the system bus, we'll support those where it doesn't
interfere with D-Bus' primary goals, but when it starts interfering with
those primary goals we should stop.

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>