Bug#871618: gnome-terminal: package should depend on dbus-x11

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 10 Aug 2017 at 14:30:30 -0700, Mark Hedges wrote:
> I verified that other X programs are working through the ssh tunnel, like xeyes
> and gvim.

I didn't see you mention previously that you were using a ssh tunnel.
Are you using X-forwarding to have their windows appear on a machine that
is not the one actually executing the code?

This is not the normal use-case for Linux desktop software (any more), and
programs with the same client/server, single-instance behaviour as
gnome-terminal will not necessarily work in this environment. The model of
what it means to be in a login session that is used by dbus-user-session
is not designed for X-forwarding, and it is possible that dbus-x11 works
better in that environment.

The central issue with dbus-x11 is that nobody is sure what is meant to
work and what merely works by coincidence, which makes it difficult to
reason about and maintain - if someone reports a bug, we cannot know
whether fixing that bug will break it for someone else (for example,
you). That's why we prefer dbus-user-session for new installations -
its model has the advantage of being very simple.

Adding a dbus-x11 dependency to gnome-terminal for this would not be
appropriate. We set the dependencies according to what works for the
most normal use-cases, and X-forwarding is not among those any more -
if that is what you want then it's up to you to arrange for it to work.

If you want to use dbus-x11's model of what is a session (one session per
(uid, machine, X11 display) tuple) then you will need to remove the
dbus-user-session package in addition to installing dbus-x11. If you have
both installed, and you are booting with systemd, then dbus-user-session
takes precedence.

    S