D-Bus Versus Varlink

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2024 12:58:54 +0000, Thomas Kluyver wrote:

> It looks like various design choices allow for a convenient CLI,
> which is something I've always found a bit awkward with D-Bus.
> Compare these two calls querying the default resolver/bus:
> 
> varlink call org.varlink.resolver.GetInfo
> dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

With my “call” example script
<https://gitlab.com/ldo/dbussy_examples/>, you can do

    call session org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus ListNames

which is only slightly less cluttered; and you have the “--json”
option for passing arguments and returning results, which isn’t
available with either dbus-send or gdbus, that I can see.

> Podman (another project with RH involved) seems to have thought in
> 2020 [1] that varlink is more or less deprecated and ripped it out.

That does worry me. Should I continue working on my Python binding for
varlink?