What is the point of dbus?

Does anybody know why dbus exists? I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a usecase for dbus that isn’t already covered by Unix sockets.

You want to remotely control a daemon? Use sockets. You want the daemon to respond to the client? Sockets. Want to exchange information in json? plaintext? binary data? Sockets can do it. Want to restrict access to a socket? Go ahead, change the socket’s permissions. Want to prevent unauthorized programs from pretending to be someone they’re not? Change the permissions of the directory containing the socket. Want network transparency? That’s why we have abstract sockets.

Plenty of well-established software uses sockets. Music player daemon uses sockets. BSPWM uses sockets. Tmux uses sockets. Pipewire uses sockets. Dhcpcd uses sockets. Heck, dbus itself relies on sockets!

For developers, using sockets is easy. I once wrote a program that interfaced with BSPWM, and it was a breeze. Dbus, on the other hand, not so much. I tried writing a Python script that would contact Network Manager and check the WiFi signal strength. Right off the bat I’m using some obscure undocumented package for interfacing with dbus. What is an introspection? What is a proxy object? What is an interface? Why do I need 60 lines of (Python!) code for a seemingly trivial operation?

So why do some developers decide to use dbus when they could just use unix sockets and save a lot of hassle for themselves and others?

possiblylinux127,

Its so that your system can hold passengers

bus

maryjayjay,

*can hold dpassengers

norgur,
@norgur@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Get into de bus?

bizdelnick,

Multicast.

chitak166,

I’m a firm believer that the vast majority of things we needed for software were implemented by the 2000s.

Usually, people who don’t understand what they’re doing will overcomplicate things to cover-up their misunderstandings. I think choosing a technology before you have a use-case is one of these examples.

vsis,
@vsis@feddit.cl avatar

Those who don’t understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. ~HS

kariboka,

Hichard Stallman?

mvirts,

What’s the point of sockets?

loopgru,

WHY is Gamora?

Aux,

What is the point of a steak when you can drink tea? Mmm…

ninekeysdown,
@ninekeysdown@lemmy.world avatar

I just came across this - fedoramagazine.org/d-bus-overview/ - and I think it explains it pretty well.

corsicanguppy,

Lennart said so.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

No. DBUS has its roots in freedesktop.org and the KDE+Gnome projects. It’s basically a desktop agnostic reimplemented of KDE’s DCOP, which was itself a simplified CORBA (gnome was using ORBit at the time, if I recall correctly). DBUS was so useful that the domain spaces its been applied to soon rapidly outgrew the desktop space, and this is why it’s usually started earlier these days.

It also works on Windows.

AProfessional,

DBus works very poorly on Windows unfortunately.

WarmApplePieShrek,

GNOME also works because Lennart said so.

But I think DBUS was a simpler KDE reimplementatioon of something GNOME did.

ILikeBoobies,

Dbus is a better name

smpl,
@smpl@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I will conveniently avoid any dbus talk, because the why is not so interesting as the how and direct you to this path /var/run/wpa_supplicant. You would probably send SCAN_RESULTS on the socket, you could also initiate a SCAN first to include the strength of stations you’re not connected to. If you want deeper access to wireless, you use netlink to communicate with the kernel (see /usr/include/linux/nl80211.h) and poke some NL80211_STA_INFOs… or the other direction (everything is a file) you just parse /proc/net/wireless without any special permissions for the current signal strength.

Oh… and btw dbus has a simple binary protocol underneath all the XML/interface fluff and uses a UNIX socket.

gens,

Because not using OOP is hard for gui devs.

MonkderZweite, (edited )

Btw, why do i need to start xfce/xfwm with dbus for automount in thunar to work, instead of just running dbus as a service on the side?

renzev,

By “start with dbus” do you mean with the dbus-launch utility? I think it’s needed because it sets some environment variables that thunar uses to actually find and connect to the bus. If you run just the daemon “on the side”, thunar won’t know how to connect to it. Kind of how you need $DISPLAY to be set correctly for X11 applications to work.

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