Does yelp (or any dbus user) really not work with a remote X client?

[Chris G]

I recently tried to install and use Gnome Planner on a remote system.
I.e. I'm trying to use it in the classic X client/server setup where
the application runs as an X client process on a remote machine and
the X server is on my desktop machine.

It doesn't work because Gnome Planner tries to use dbus on the client
machine and (not surprisingly) fails because there is no Gnome session
running there.

Trying to run yelp (to look at the Gnome Planner Help files) also
fails miserably in much the same way.  I get a whole lot of errors
starting as follows:-

    (yelp:2860): Yelp-WARNING **: Cannot find dbus bus

    GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible
    causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you
    have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See
    http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1:
    Failed to get connection to session: Failed to connect to socket
    /tmp/dbus-nrMIzFk9Y7: Connection refused)
    GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible
    causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you
    have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See
    http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1:
    Failed to get connection to session: Failed to connect to socket
    /tmp/dbus-JTLaNQBBPo: Connection refused)

    (yelp:2860): Yelp-WARNING **: Failed to load config file: No such file
    or directory


Is the Gnome implementation of X really this broken?  It's so
fundamental to the way X works to be able to run remote client
processes that it seems amazing to me that things can be so broken. 

Other (non-Gnome) applications that don't attempt to use dbus work
perfectly OK as remote X clients.  It's seems that it's just the Gnome
dbus bit that causes things not to work.

Have I missed something obvious?  Is there some way to tell an X
client process that the dbus it wants to talk to is on another
machine?  If not then this is a huge hole in Gnome IMHO.

-- 
Chris Green