I wonder if the design of D-Bus has anything to do with a principle I notice a lot, where the most meritorious solution never rises to the top for any given problem, but rather one apparently chosen by absolute randomness. For example, I wonder how many repos on github have legitimately created a 100% better framework than React, but the author simply can't get the word out for whatever reason, so the project remains accidentally anonymous. Maybe D-Bus has something similar?
> the most meritorious solution never rises to the top for any given problem, but rather one apparently chosen by absolute randomness.
Respectfully, i think that mostly happens when people reviewing the solution space don't understand the problem fully. Often the requirements differ from what people think they are, and as a result the winner seems random because they don't understand the actual requirements.
D-Bus came to prominence because of its association with GNOME, which has in turn has remained relevant mostly because of its association with Red Hat.
Over the last couple of decades, Red Hat has been their single largest supporter both in terms of providing cash and employing people to work on GNOME. Their annual reports don’t make it clear, but has this changed?
Most of the time, there is usually no "most meritorious", just something that is elsewhere on the "trade-off space" than the person speaking would like. I usually dismiss everybody who so snidely and arrogantly dismisses results of other people's work(e.g. the OP article), like there was some _obviously_ correct solution that the people who worked on the widely accepted solution were too stupid or malicious to choose. They could not possibly have had other priorities or doing their best to get something working acceptably in a complex ecosystem with no central control, no! They are just dumber than you (or just plain malicious).
Part of what's going on is that all of this stuff is developed by volunteers. If only one person, or three people or whatever, are actually willing to give up hundreds of thousands of hours of their own time to work on something, then those people get to make the decisions about what gets done. There's very little supervision from any kind of "upper management" to catch bad decisions.
On top of that, there's adverse selection here. Who gives up thousands of hours to work on some obscure corner of the Linux desktop? People with quite unusual thought processes.
iirc it was developed as freedesktop project in order to create standard desktop bus to be used by everybody, as back in a day kde had it's own bus and gnome had another one.
The world is filled with "good enough" solutions. If it has 80% of the functionally needed, it will be good enough for most use cases.
> the most meritorious solution never rises to the top
You know why? Because it was the best solution at the time that covered everything they needed. You can only complain about it because the initial problem was solved and people were able to move on to something else.
Does it work for what we need it to do? Yes? Ok. Now that we have settled this problem, we can continue on developing.
Meritocracy is only relevant to someone who has ideas but no desire or ability to actually structure the idea in such a way that would work in the world we find ourselves in today.
> Maybe D-Bus has something similar?
So you just commented here to say nothing but "dbus sucks because it isn't the best. I wonder if there are better options?".
