Simon McVittie wrote: > On Wed, 27 Jul 2016 at 18:02:32 +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote: > > Is that really up-to the individual application to declare a > > dependency > > against dbus-user-session | dbus-x11 ? > > At the moment: yes. A dependency on dbus-x11 (in jessie) or on > dbus-user-session | dbus-x11 (now) can be used to signify "this > application or library is useless without a working session bus". > Apps that rely on Telepathy, Tracker or the Evolution servers are > good examples of a legitimate dependency on the session bus. > > Depending on dbus is not enough: that only guarantees working D-Bus > binaries (so you have all the right bits to get a session bus, but some > assembly is required) and a working system bus. > > The only other ways I can think of right now to express that requirement > are: > > * introduce a metapackage "dbus-session" with that dependency, and > ask these apps to depend on it, or on dbus-session | dbus-x11 to be > nice to backports; [...] > The last time this changed was the introduction of dbus-x11 in 2007; > twice in a decade isn't bad. I don't think it's necessarily going to > change again any time soon (unless we do a transition to > dbus-x11 | dbus-user-session and then another to > dbus-user-session | dbus-x11, which is why I'd prefer not to do that > two-stage approach).
I can think of another reason that this might change: if we introduce an (experimental, and eventually non-experimental) variant based on a future stable version of kdbus. If we need to go through this transition anyway, could we please go ahead and introduce a dbus-session-bus package for other packages to depend on, to allow for potential future transitions or experiments? - Josh Triplett