Subject: [bug#73296] [PATCH v2] home: services: dbus: Add utilities to profile.

From: Simon Streit <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:02:41 +0200

Hello!

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Antero Mejr <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> * gnu/home/services/desktop.scm (home-dbus-service-type)[extensions]:
>> Extend home-profile-service-type to add dbus-launch and other such
>> utilities to the home profile.
>>
>> Change-Id: I9a3dc00d52b66c327f4eae523bddf758bddddb9e
>
> I must say I don’t fully understand the use case of
> ‘home-dbus-service-type’ since usually the user’s dbus session is
> started automatically, on demand (for example, spawning pulseaudio will
> automatically start a dbus session if it’s not already running).
>
> Often I find that for such services we don’t necessarily want to
> “clutter” the user’s profile with low-level tools such as ‘dbus-launch’
> in this case.  But I’m not sure here.
>
> Could you explain?  What’s the point of ‘home-dbus-service-type’?  :-)

This is an interesting question that you are asking.  For me, and the
first two years with Guix, I never had a proper running dbus session
when running, first with i3, and then with sway from there on.  It would
work with GNOME.  But I'd never hang around there for long and I learned
to live without dbus that would produce strange effects in strange
situations.

It only happened after I migrated to Guix Home and enabling
home-dbus-service-type that I finally had a fully functioning
environment with dbus.  It solved so many problems since and I never
fully understood why I was missing dbus in the first place.  It either
never either launched properly -- which I doubt, since applications like
pulseaudio where running --, or I had never sourced some variables
properly.

To answer your question: This service is quite the requirement to have a
desktop environment that is not based on the bigger variants that
usually provide it.

Kind regards

-- 
Simon