Status of dbus-python

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2018 at 14:58:07 +0200, Alan Martinovic wrote:
> is it known what is the status of d-bus python?

It is semi-maintained but not really recommended. It has design flaws
that cannot be fixed without losing its most important feature ("is
compatible with dbus-python").

> The package on PyPI is pretty old (1.2.4)

Oh, I should update that at some point. The primary download location
is freedesktop.org, and dbus-python is the only thing I maintain that
has releases on PyPI, so I never remember how to update them...

Source releases are canonically available here:
https://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus-python/
(and when I get round to updating PyPI, it'll just get a copy of the latest
one of those)

Because dbus-python is a Python wrapper around libdbus, an OS-level C
library, you might be better off using a binary release of dbus-python
from your OS distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or equivalent).
dbus-python is not a fast-moving project, and any version from the last
couple of years should be fine.

> and basically suggest not to use it:
> 
> > dbus-python might not be the best D-Bus binding for you
> > to use.

I wrote that text and I stand by it.

It might be the best D-Bus binding for you to use, or it might not.
Please make an informed decision on its merits, and don't just go for
dbus-python because it's the one that has the "dbus" name.

> However the repo seems to be pretty much alive

The changes I made in January were to decouple it from dbus-glib, which
nobody should be using. It has no new features and few new bug fixes.

> The GDBus seems more difficult to start with

I'd still recommend either GDBus via gi.repository.Gio, or some
convenience layer over it, as a better basis for a general-purpose
D-Bus implementation.

> and can't make use of sd-bus at the moment

It sounds as though you might be confused about the status of GDBus and
sd-bus. A GDBus-based library will probably never use sd-bus, for
approximately the same reasons that wget doesn't use libcurl: they are
different implementations of the same idea (but you can talk D-Bus to
any service with both, the same way you can download from any web server
with either wget or curl).

libdbus, GDBus and sd-bus are three independent C implementations of
the D-Bus protocol, with different designs, different priorities and
different design trade-offs. They interoperate (you can write a client
with any of them and talk to a server that uses any other) but their C
APIs are incompatible. A Python binding for one of them is very unlikely
to be compatible with a Python binding for a different one, because the
author of a Python binding will have chosen a suitable C library and a
suitable API to match their own priorities.

A GDBus client can communicate with systemd via D-Bus: because all
D-Bus implementations are interoperable, you don't have to use sd-bus
to communicate with systemd.

    smcv