D-Bus policies. system bus and bus names

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 31 May 2017 at 14:43:17 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> D-Bus can also be used in a client/server setup, quite independent of
> the D-Bus Daemon and the whole session/system-bus mechanism. Just
> listen for direct client connections on your own server address (e.g. a
> Unix socket).

It can, but this is really something for experts only - to use D-Bus
in a client/server arrangement bypassing the dbus-daemon, you have to
be more aware of how the IPC actually works. In particular, you have to
take responsibility for deciding what your security model is and providing
whatever security properties are appropriate for that model.

The primary use-cases for D-Bus are the well-known session and system
buses on GNU/Linux and other free/open-source Unix-derived systems
(mainly the BSDs). Contributions that improve the other use-cases (including
direct client/server, Windows, non-GNU Linux such as Android, and proprietary
Unix) are welcome, as long as they do not harm the maintainability of the
well-known buses; but they are not the highest priority for allocating
maintainer time, and in particular bugs that affect the well-known buses
will tend to be treated as higher priority than bugs that affect direct
client/server.

You are welcome to use the client/server setup in designs if it works
for you, but be aware that you will probably need to support it yourself.

    S