Re: DBUS [was] Re: [gentoo-user] systemd

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 1:17 PM, Stroller
>>>> Reading that blog entry I found discouraging the idea that dbus might be required on my servers in the future, if systemd becomes popular with distros.
>>>
>>> I don't see the problem with D-Bus. It's small (the only hard
>>> dependency it has is an XML parser), and it provides the Linux/UNIX
>>> (de facto) standard interprocess communication system.
>>
>> My chief gripe with D-Bus is that I've had X sessions disappear out
>> from under me as a consequence of the daemon being restarted. Having a
>> single point of failure like that is very, very scary. Otherwise, I
>> like what it tries to do.
>
> Restarting or dying? If it's dying, it's a bug and should be reported.
> I haven't had a crash in dbus in years, and I think pretty much
> everyone agrees it's pretty stable nowadays. It even tries to handle
> gracefully thins like out-of-memory errors and things like that.

I have no doubt a stellar amount of work has been done to gracefully
handle problem scenarios.

>
> If it's restarting, why on earth will someone restart the system bus
> with active X sessions? If the dbus daemon is restarted, it has to
> kick all the apps from the bus, including the session manager.

Because I generally update my desktop system while running X, and on
at least two occasions, an update killed my X session by restarting
DBUS on me

On the other hand, sshd handles restarts without killing active sessions.

These are solvable problems which DBUS hasn't solved yet for itself.
High-availability is one of the best-researched fields in computer
science, but DBUS doesn't handle that case, yet.

-- 
:wq