Re:Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie
by digi_owl on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @06:46PM
(#9030681)
I think you are hitting on something with this. And part of the problem is perhaps that so much happens across dbus.
I recall trying to set up dbus on a minimal install, and finding that often when something borked, it borked in odd ways. This in that a signal could seemingly get stuck inside dbus, as one party thought it had sent the relevant message, the other party never responded in kind, and the only real way to get everything unstuck was to kill dbus and all relevant parties (pretty much a reboot of anything above the kernel these days).
With something as seemingly simple as mounting a thumbdrive, the process goes something like filemanager > udisk > pol(icy)kit > consolekit/logind. All that to "verify" that the person sitting at the keyboard has the rights to do "mount /dev/sdb1". And every > in that chain involves dbus. So if dbus borks, everything borks. And dbus is pretty much a black box.
I recall trying to set up dbus on a minimal install, and finding that often when something borked, it borked in odd ways. This in that a signal could seemingly get stuck inside dbus, as one party thought it had sent the relevant message, the other party never responded in kind, and the only real way to get everything unstuck was to kill dbus and all relevant parties (pretty much a reboot of anything above the kernel these days).
With something as seemingly simple as mounting a thumbdrive, the process goes something like filemanager > udisk > pol(icy)kit > consolekit/logind. All that to "verify" that the person sitting at the keyboard has the rights to do "mount /dev/sdb1". And every > in that chain involves dbus. So if dbus borks, everything borks. And dbus is pretty much a black box.