Status of dbus-python

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2018 at 10:19:05 +0200, Alan Martinovic wrote:
> Do you know if libdbus (and on top of that your bindings) can use
> kdbus as the underlying server/daemon?

kdbus wasn't a server or daemon (that was sort of the point). I think
the word you're looking for might be "transport".

kdbus was a proposed Linux kernel feature to let D-Bus-like messages go
directly between peers without going through a centralized message bus
daemon (dbus-daemon is the reference message bus daemon, although there
are experimental alternatives). Normally, messages get to the message
bus daemon via one of several transports, usually an AF_UNIX socket
(or sometimes TCP, but that's only recommended for Windows, where AF_UNIX
doesn't exist).

The kdbus kernel feature was accompanied by a D-Bus transport
implementation in sd-bus that passed messages directly between peers. The
only centralized components required in that design were for activation
(provided by systemd itself, I think) and compatibility with the
traditional D-Bus AF_UNIX transport (provided by sd-bus-proxy).

kdbus wasn't merged and probably never will be, so nothing can usefully
use it. I think sd-bus was the only D-Bus implementation that officially
supported it, and that support was removed after it became clear that
kdbus wouldn't be merged any time soon. I think there was also a patch-set
to add a kdbus transport to GDBus, but it wasn't merged. I don't think
there was ever a complete patch-set to add a kdbus transport to libdbus.

    smcv