Can you think of even a single thing dbus can do that my approach cannot do? Emphasis on cannot here -- if you do reply to this, I expect you to prove that the thing cannot be done by any simpler means. If not, then why does dbus need to exist? Better question -- why are people who insist on writing software that doesn't need to exist given decision-making powers in fd.o? Software is like a form of pollution -- more code means more bugs and more security holes (and dbus isn't immune [1]). Any greenhorn developer can write lots and lots of code; it takes wisdom and experience to avoid writing code. So if people who don't grok this are running fd.o, why should I trust anything fd.o produces?

Before you try and tone-police the above, you should know that it is fd.o that needs to convince me to venerate their software artifacts. People writing more code isn't by itself praiseworthy -- code is a goddamn liability, so it had better have a good reason to exist and (in dbus's case) have a very good reason to be widely depended-on. Just because you happen to like or use someone's code doesn't mean that it is any good.

> And I don't understand what you mean by re-implement POSIX IPC analogues, dbus is essentially just a wire format for Unix domain sockets and a message bus that routes the messages, it doesn't re-implement anything.

I guess if you didn't understand POSIX IPC, you wouldn't see how this sentence is an oxymoron. The kernel itself gives you all the trappings of a message bus for free. You don't need a wholly-separate daemon and wire format spec.

Also, the only people who seem to use dbus's wire format are dbus clients. Even when dbus was new, there were already widely-used and well-understood formats for representing structured data (e.g. ASN.1, typed netstrings, S-expressions) that could have been leveraged to make interacting with the service that much more straightforward. But then again, we're talking about people who wanted to re-invent POSIX IPC, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they also wanted to impose their own wire format on the world.

> If you don't care about policies then all those things in X can be a good thing

I know better than anyone else on Earth what graphical policies are good for me, so I'm going to take this as your affirmation that X is indeed the right tool for the job for people like me who know what they want out of their computers. I stopped using DEs years ago because I got tired of having to fight them all the time to get them to do the things I needed.

[1] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/d...