I access a machine through multiple login sessions. The sessions' lifetimes may or may not overlap. In my case, these login sessions are currently always over SSH, but I would prefer to handle local sessions too.
I sometimes need D-Bus in these sessions, and I want to share the same D-Bus session across these login sessions, in order to use GVFS.
What is the recommended way to do this? I don't want to break any use of D-Bus that I may not be aware of. I've considered using
export $(dbus-launch --autolaunch $(cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id))
but (as of Ubuntu 12.04) this doesn't seem right:
- this requires an X session, but my SSH sessions may or may not be forwarding an X display, and even the ones that are don't have the same
$DISPLAY; - if no X display is available,
dbus-launchcomplains that “Autolaunch error: X11 initialization failed.” and doesn't start a daemon; - the
dbus-launchman page states that “The--autolaunchoption is considered an internal implementation detail (…). There's no real reason to use it outside of the libdbus implementation anyhow.”
Does dbus-launch or another tool in the D-Bus suite support automatically detecting a running dbus-daemon and connecting to it? The necessary information is in ~/.dbus/session-bus/$(cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id)-${DISPLAY#*:} if D-Bus is started with an X connection, but doesn't seem to be stored anywhere if no X connection is available.
Should I cobble my own D-Bus session file? If I do, should I use a file in the ~/.dbus/session-bus directory? Is the path /var/lib/dbus/machine-id reliable and portable?
