Clarification on upstart-0.5 and dbus usage

[Garrett Cooper]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Michael Biebl <mbiebl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/6/19 Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com>:
>> On Thu, 2008-06-19 at 00:10 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>>
>>> 2008/6/18 Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com>:
>>> > On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 16:11 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> The DBus interface can be accessed in one of 2 ways. One is actually
>>> >> running the dbus daemon, and accessing the com.ubuntu.Upstart object on
>>> >> the system bus.
>>> >>
>>> > Actually, this is the only supported way.
>>> >
>>> > While there is another, secret, way -- it's not intended for general use
>>> > and may change or be taken away without notice.
>>>
>>> Hm, I'd actually prefer somehow, if core tools, like
>>> initctl/runlevel/telinit etc would talk to upstart directly without
>>> the need of a running dbus system bus.
>>>
>> Any particular reason?
>
> - Someone deletes his dbus job file.
> - dbus-daemon fails to start (misconfiguration, whatever)
> - upstart would be usable without the complete dbus package (it would
> only have to depend on libdbus)
>
> It's more of a gut feeling, that relying on the system bus for these
> core tools, makes upstart more fragile and error prone.
>
> Cheers,
> Michael

I have to agree with Michael. More possible points of human input for
upstart during critical stages in system startup just make it more
brittle when dealing with confused users or misconfigured systems,
input from rogue scripts, etc, esp when dbus is a shared 'resource'
amongst different system applications.
-Garrett