bug#48538: D-Bus services not working on foreign distributions/non-user profiles

[John Kehayias]

Hi everyone,

I also ran into this issue, where I've put all my packages in various profiles, 
with the default one being empty (outside of short-lived packages for trying 
out). This is a setup is mentioned in the cookbook, on profiles and manifests.

Since the dbus files are not in the default profile, I was running into issues 
with dbus seeing them with the default system daemon (from %desktop-services). 
As suggested above, one workaround is to use dbus-run-session to launch a 
program (no problems).

I found a better one for me, which may be due to how I run my desktop session. 
I use the default gdm but just an .xsession file (which is just my .xinitrc, 
like a plain startx setup). If I modify my WM start in the final line from just 
`exec WM` to `dbus-launch --exit-with-session WM` that works for me. Seems to 
be an issue of how the dbus daemon is run. Could also be a side effect from not 
adding the xsession properly to gdm, but I haven't tried with .desktop files 
yet. (Another work around suggested on IRC was to start a user daemon from the 
login profile; this didn't work for me.) Also note that I did have glib in the 
profile, so that XDG_DATA_DIRS was properly in the profile, and all profiles 
loaded at login.

Hope this is helpful and that we can find a proper solution, as I think this is 
a tricky bug to encounter for a user.

John