'What is D-Bus' introductory document

[Thomas Kluyver]

Hi all,

I've had a go at writing my own introductory document to explain what D-Bus is. I've seen a few other takes on this - on freedesktop.org, from KDE and from txdbus - but they all dive more into technical details than I wanted. I wanted something to describe why you might want to use D-Bus and what sort of things it can do, more than how it's designed. KDE's introduction (https://develop.kde.org/docs/use/d-bus/introduction_to_dbus/ ) seemed closest to this, but I wanted to try myself.

You can see the result at: https://jeepney--28.org.readthedocs.build/en/28/dbus-background.html

That's a temporary URL because it's not yet merged. I'm interested in feedback - on or off list by email, or on the merge request on Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/takluyver/jeepney/-/merge_requests/28 ). Is anything likely to be confusing or misleading? Have I left out a great example or a crucial concept? If anyone here is relatively new to D-Bus, I'm especially interested to hear your view, because it's always hard trying to write an introduction to something you know quite well.

I've deliberately left out a lot of information that could be there - e.g. about transports, authentication, data types, or introspection - because I want to keep it as concise as possible, and to focus on what you could do with D-Bus, not how it works. I've tried to include enough high-level concepts (e.g. methods, signals, buses) to help someone make sense of other documentation. So I might push back on suggestions to add material. But if you think something I've omitted is really essential, I'm still interested, even if I disagree.

Thanks,
Thomas