Can you think of even a single thing dbus can do that my approach cannot do? Emphasis on cannot here -- if you do reply to this, I expect you to prove that the thing cannot be done by any simpler means. If not, then why does dbus need to exist? Better question -- why are people who insist on writing software that doesn't need to exist given decision-making powers in fd.o? Software is like a form of pollution -- more code means more bugs and more security holes (and dbus isn't immune [1]). Any greenhorn developer can write lots and lots of code; it takes wisdom and experience to avoid writing code. So if people who don't grok this are running fd.o, why should I trust anything fd.o produces?

Before you try and tone-police the above, you should know that it is fd.o that needs to convince me to venerate their software artifacts. People writing more code isn't by itself praiseworthy -- code is a goddamn liability, so it had better have a good reason to exist and (in dbus's case) have a very good reason to be widely depended-on. Just because you happen to like or use someone's code doesn't mean that it is any good.

> And I don't understand what you mean by re-implement POSIX IPC analogues, dbus is essentially just a wire format for Unix domain sockets and a message bus that routes the messages, it doesn't re-implement anything.

I guess if you didn't understand POSIX IPC, you wouldn't see how this sentence is an oxymoron. The kernel itself gives you all the trappings of a message bus for free. You don't need a wholly-separate daemon and wire format spec.

Also, the only people who seem to use dbus's wire format are dbus clients. Even when dbus was new, there were already widely-used and well-understood formats for representing structured data (e.g. ASN.1, typed netstrings, S-expressions) that could have been leveraged to make interacting with the service that much more straightforward. But then again, we're talking about people who wanted to re-invent POSIX IPC, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they also wanted to impose their own wire format on the world.

> If you don't care about policies then all those things in X can be a good thing

I know better than anyone else on Earth what graphical policies are good for me, so I'm going to take this as your affirmation that X is indeed the right tool for the job for people like me who know what they want out of their computers. I stopped using DEs years ago because I got tired of having to fight them all the time to get them to do the things I needed.

[1] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/d...

I don't understand what you are saying about freedesktop.org. That is just another volunteer run open source organization that hosts projects that are loosely related to open source desktops, you can start contributing to that if you want, or you can not use any of it if you don't find it useful. I'm just here for an interesting conversation, I'm not trying to convince you of anything, and I would rather not continue this discussion if you're going to start throwing around insults and making it personal and accusing other developers of being ignorant or having bad intentions. Please don't do any more of that, it's not interesting conversation and it's against the rules here. You're better than that. If that's tone policing then I'm sorry but my point is we ultimately can't have a conversation if your goal is to attack other people who aren't even here and tear them down, that just isn't my goal.

I also still don't see what you mean about dbus, the Linux kernel itself doesn't specify a wire format for arbitrary messages, and doesn't specify all the things that you need to get the complete functionality of a message bus. Maybe you could get that with another operating system that is based around message passing but Linux is not that. The methods you describe could technically be done without a daemon, but they still require a lot of additional code to set up a bunch of files and sockets and enforce ordering, security, etc, which could also contain bugs. You could tell the applications to implement all that themselves or you could put it all in a daemon which is mostly what dbus does anyway, and by doing it in one daemon it totally eliminates a certain class of race conditions and synchronization issues. Again please refer to the comments by the dbus developer that I showed, this conversation is not new and already happened years ago. If you want to store ASN.1 or S-expressions in a d-bus message you can do that pretty easily. And if you really believe that your solution could work then I would encourage you to develop a dbus implementation that works like you describe and then test to see if it works exactly the same and doesn't break existing setups. But I don't think this would really work, you wouldn't really be saving many lines of code, and in particular multicast and service activation would be pretty hard to do in the way dbus does it without a central message bus.

If you don't agree with GNOME or KDE's policies and you want to implement your own IPC then that's great, I support you doing what you need to do, however they chose dbus a long time ago, and currently it's looking like X is not the right tool for them anymore, so you may just have to accept your differences and move on.

I see that you didn't take me up on my challenge to prove that dbus does anything we couldn't easily do with bread-and-butter POSIX IPC. Just regurgitating something I could have just read on the dbus homepage isn't fooling anyone.

Look, I have very strong opinions on what software I consider worth running on my computer, because I've been doing this for a long, long time. I also have very strong opinions on how to go about solving the problems that dbus, udev, systemd, logind, PulseAudo, and the rest of the fd.o middleware purport to solve. I also happen to strongly disagree with how they go about doing it. But, please don't misconstrue this as me believing that their authors don't have a right to create whatever software they see fit. I put my money where my mouth is on this and write code to do the things I want if I can't bear to use the code they publish -- in fact, I have my own binary-compatible udev replacement waiting on stand-by but ready-to-go in case udev comes to hard-depend on systemd [1].

I normally don't share my opinions publicly like this because it causes people like yourself to crawl out of the woodwork and throw well-meaning but unsolicited advice and github links at me to wrappers and adapters for projects that depend on the very software and the very architectural paradigms I'm trying to avoid. When I try to explain this is not what I asked for, it falls on deaf ears. It's a supremely annoying, frustrating experience.

I don't know if you remember, but the only thing I was trying to find out in this entire comment thread is whether or not Wayland solves a problem that was truly impossible to solve with an X extension. I've already got my answer: no, it does not. So, I think I'm done here.

[1] https://github.com/jcnelson/vdev