Re: D-BUS and Xforwarding.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Davyd Madeley wrote:
> I have pondered the idea of a Dbus-over-X bridge. That is, when
> attempting to connect to the session bus, it detects that DISPLAY
> implies you're on a remote machine, and then uses X11 to communicate
> with the same machine that is running your X server via a bus proxy
> back to the session daemon.

I started writing the dbus-X bridge at one point early in dbus's life, 
but dropped it and didn't get back to it.

It's a fine idea. You should not need to try and figure out DISPLAY; 
just include the X bridge as the second address to try in 
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and in theory libdbus will fall back to it if 
better methods fail.

I do think changing ssh to forward DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is a better 
long-term solution, but would obviously have to be implemented and then 
wouldn't be widely deployed for several years.

The only real question here is how to avoid the Xlib dependency for 
libdbus, there are various hacks one could employ.

Havoc