Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files?

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 02:18:43PM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote
> On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:57:57 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> 
> > > but D-Bus provides a standard way for applications to communicate
> > > with one another and removing it can stop your desktop working as
> > > it should.  
> > 
> >   Then how did things manage to work on my systems for the past 9 years,
> > pray tell?
> 
> Because nine years ago, Linux desktop  software didn't use interprocess
> communication. Of course things will still work, but not necessarily
> everything. For example, Network Manager uses D-Bus to tell programs when
> your Internet connection is available and not, so your mail client goes
> into offline mode rather than pointlessly trying to access your mailbox.
> KDE4 uses it quite extensively, ust as KDE3 used DCOP.

  There is too much solution-in-search-of-a-problem here.  XMMS followed
the original Unix philosophy... it did one thing did it right, namely
playing audio.  Unfortunately, XMMS was hard-coded to use a now obsolete
GTK library.

  The "successor" to XMMS is Audacious.  It seems to subscribe to the
Microsoft philosophy, and tries to do everything under the sun, and
pretends it's a server, which requires dbus.  Is it *REALLY* necessary?
I used XMMS to play mp3's and Live365.com.  I ended up switching to
mpg123 for both functions when XMMS was dropped, and then to the Flash
player for Live365.  I emerged Audacious, but unmerged it when I saw the
post-install warning that said not to submit any Audacious bug reports
if I don't have dbus installed.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>