On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 02:18:43PM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote > On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:57:57 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote: > > > > but D-Bus provides a standard way for applications to communicate > > > with one another and removing it can stop your desktop working as > > > it should. > > > > Then how did things manage to work on my systems for the past 9 years, > > pray tell? > > Because nine years ago, Linux desktop software didn't use interprocess > communication. Of course things will still work, but not necessarily > everything. For example, Network Manager uses D-Bus to tell programs when > your Internet connection is available and not, so your mail client goes > into offline mode rather than pointlessly trying to access your mailbox. > KDE4 uses it quite extensively, ust as KDE3 used DCOP.
There is too much solution-in-search-of-a-problem here. XMMS followed the original Unix philosophy... it did one thing did it right, namely playing audio. Unfortunately, XMMS was hard-coded to use a now obsolete GTK library. The "successor" to XMMS is Audacious. It seems to subscribe to the Microsoft philosophy, and tries to do everything under the sun, and pretends it's a server, which requires dbus. Is it *REALLY* necessary? I used XMMS to play mp3's and Live365.com. I ended up switching to mpg123 for both functions when XMMS was dropped, and then to the Flash player for Live365. I emerged Audacious, but unmerged it when I saw the post-install warning that said not to submit any Audacious bug reports if I don't have dbus installed. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org>
