Passing file descriptors over DBUS

[Havoc Pennington]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 17:43 +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> In order to make the X server more flexible in handling configuration changes 
> one of the ideas so far is to use DBUS (either via the session bus, or via a 
> P2P connection) to tell the X server about it's configuration. For that to 
> work in a secure way, one of the requirements is to have the ability to pass 
> an open file descriptor across DBUS. (See man 7 unix, SCM_RIGHTS)
> 
> What are my chances of getting such functionality adopted in DBUS?

Here's some past discussion:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2004-October/001690.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2004-October/001691.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2004-November/001692.html

Basic conclusion then seemed to be, we couldn't figure out how to
implement it, or at least that it would be a lot of work and raise some
complicated issues. But it may be that there are simple solutions given
enough thought.

The system bus is already used to obtain network configuration for
example (in NetworkManager), so there may be a way to use that same
approach.

Havoc