Re: [gentoo-user] sans-dbus was: gnome intrusion?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I knew Gentoo doesn't force the use of dbus, but I had the flag set,
> since I expected assorted breakages. For example, when viewing a pdf
> file, will updating the view when the file changes be possible without
> dbus? This is the kind of trouble I expect. Not the fault of Gentoo,
> anyway.
>
> As for the *kit stuff, I just don't have it. It's safe to do without
> that stuff, as far as I can tell.
> ...
> For my needs, Gentoo is the best distro out there. (Until recently, I
> used Slackware, as well as Gentoo. Had to give up on Slackware 14.2,
> with regret. Because pulseaudio,)
>

To each his own, and I'm glad Gentoo supports running without any of
this stuff, but on a semi-typical system I'd suggest that you're
probably better off having this stuff installed than otherwise.

I'd been running without pulseaudio for ages, but finally got around
to installing it because I was having audio issues when running
multiple X11 sessions.  With pulse it just works, and installing pulse
was pretty trivial.  Sure, it is overkill in the most basic
configurations, but as soon as you start getting multiple audio
devices/users/etc all going at the same time the purpose for the
complexity becomes more apparent.

As far as dbus/policykit goes, it really is just an IPC
implementation, because IPC on Linux isn't all that great
out-of-the-box.  It was shot down for the kernel, but a revamped
solution is probably likely to take its place there, and then
everybody will just use the kernel version (and you'll see dbus
disappear in your process list).  Sure, it is more complex than
sending SIGUSR1 to a process (while trying to remember which of
less-dedicated signals do what for what daemon), but it is a lot more
capable.  Policykit also lets you do stuff like saying this user is
allowed to restart this service, but not do anything else, and so on,
using a configuration which is flexible and works across different
applications/etc.

Again, you can sort-of live without this stuff, and there is nothing
wrong if you want to do that, but this stuff was written for a reason.
At the very least I'd suggest understanding it all in case it actually
might solve a problem for you.

-- 
Rich