[Telepathy] [ssh-contact] Why do I need X11 running and is there a workaround for avoiding it?

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 at 15:11:51 +0200, Christophe-Marie Duquesne wrote:
> It seems like to run ssh-contact, you need X11 running. Why? Does
> telepathy depend on it? Or directly ssh-contact? Or is it a dbus
> thing? Is it something that we could avoid?

D-Bus session apps (including all of Telepathy) require a session bus.
When run under X11, libdbus can auto-launch a session bus which will run
for as long as the X session does, then terminate.

When not running under X11, auto-launching would be bad, because there's no
obvious and automatically-detectable limit to the session lifetime. So, you
have to launch a D-Bus session yourself:

    eval `dbus-launch`

and kill it when you want your "session" to end.

(See also https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8294,
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39196 and
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39197.)

    S