Enable system services using dbus activation?
From a discussion in #alpine-devel
how to automatically activate needed system services:
19:14 <@Cogitri> @PureTryOut: gpsd doesn't provide a dbus service that is autostarted?
gpsd in particular may be a bad example because it's usually not used through dbus (the dbus interface is read-only). But we have many other system services that exclusively use dbus but we still have to start them explicitly at the moment.
Some examples:
- wpa_supplicant
- bluez
- iio-sensor-proxy
- ofono
- NetworkManager
- ModemManager
Using dbus (auto-)activation would have two advantages in my opinion:
- We don't need to bother automatically enabling the OpenRC services only if the users want them. (See #531)
- We save some CPU/RAM because services are only started when actually needed.
See also: https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/system-activation.txt
Some services might not have working dbus activation because their activation configuration just specifies a systemd service to start: e.g. bluez
Not sure if in that case it's better to have dbus start the daemon directly, or let dbus start the OpenRC service.