D-Bus, as discussed elsewhere in this thread (where I learned about this, too), is a specification rather than a concrete implementation. Are you asserting that systemd does not work with alternative D-Bus implmentations? That would be weird, seeing as how they wrote an alternative one...

Also, since I've been "reading more", and I can check after I get back from lunch--at least at some point Debian shipped systemd without D-Bus on minimal installs. Maybe that's no longer the case, but the stuff I'm reading seems to be post-2015.

Please don't be personally abrasive in arguments here. No matter how right you or feel you are, it breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Asking for clarification isn't a strawman, sorry. And it sure seemed like you were correcting me, which is why I asked. But I said that journald was the only mandatory component of systemd outside of PID1. You said this was wrong. I'm waiting for you to extrapolate? Does systemd only work with the "canonical" dbus-broker? Or does it want ("want" as I'm reading stuff that suggests it isn't absolutely required, but I'm not sure and I'm happy to caveat where I'm not sure) a D-Bus broker? Because if it's the latter, and as it's specified and they seem big on meeting specs I'm betting that it's the case, then what I said is correct and you're just being kind of a jerk about it.

Or you can keep trying to big-time me instead of engage on the merits of your position. That's cool people stuff, I guess.

This is out of the line. You were given civil arguments for why systemd requires Dbus but in your response, you accuse the other person of being a jerk and "big-timeing". Please use the strongest interpretation of other people's claims on the topic, before using them as a means to accuse them of wrongdoing.

I am inviting the strengthening of his position in order to better understand it. I asked him to elaborate because as near as I can tell there is no hard dependency on any D-Bus broker. There is possibly--I genuinely can't tell from the documentation I've been browsing through--a dependency on a D-Bus broker. Requiring a D-Bus broker does not make any one D-Bus broker mandatory...and so, if that is the case, then my assertion that journald is the only non-PID1 part of systemd that is required would hold.

I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. I invited it, even; I'm wrong all the time and being wrong is how one learns. The big-timing I referred to is the refusal to materially engage. Instead he quotes Lennart about D-Bus--out of context? who knows! It isn't an indication of the state of the software in question, just his opinion at a point in time--and to tell me to go read (read what, exactly? what generosity in citation!). Oddly enough, though, I don't see you tagging in to lecture him about that sort of sneering. Why's that?

That person is big-timing. Their tone ("you should read more" and so on) is in violation of the HN guidelines, filled with needless snark and condescension. The offending comment has been flagged by multiple users who agree that the comment doesn't meet community standards.

Perhaps the tone of JdeBP wasn't great, but they had a point. On the other hand, eropple's comment tone wasn't ideal either and they consistently miss the original point of systemd requiring dbus. Unfortunately, I am unable to check this since JdeBP post's have been censored.