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?

  • @mceplEnglish
    22•5 months ago

    Yes, of course, the sockets are the answer to everything (and BTW, d-bus uses sockets as well, e.g. /run/dbus/system_bus_socket on my current system), but the problem is no standard for the communication over these sockets (or where is the socket located). For example, X11 developed one system of communicating over their socket, but it was used just by few X11 programs, and everybody else had their other system of communication. And even if an app found some socket, there was absolutely no standard how exactly should programs communicate over it. How to send more than just plain ASCII strings? Each program had to write their own serialization/deserialization code, their own format for marshalling binary data, etc. Now there is just one standard for those protocols, and even libraries with the standard (and well tested) code for it.