Be able to set the servicedirs precedence

[afiestas]

If I'm not mistaken the default servicedirs are always read before the user-defined servicedir which makes it impossible to override a DBus system installed service since the first found service has precedence.

My main use case is to be able to start a Plasma-git or a GNOME-git session and have it co-installed with the distribution shipped packages. Having both co-installed makes it a good fallback in case something goes terribly wrong with the development versions.

[dvdhrm]

This has been coming up several times lately. I believe there is no support for overriding configuration in the D-Bus reference implementation (which we follow). I might be wrong, but you really shouldn't provide multiple services files for the same service, and expect a specific one to have precedence, at least with the status-quo.

If there is desire for such configuration, this likely needs to be brought up in the issue tracker of the reference implementation (gitlab.freedesktop.org), and likely needs some design discussions. I am a bit hesitant to introduce these features without support by the reference-implementation.

Personally, I would very much prefer to get rid of the configuration alltogether, and instead require application managers to register services. For instance, systemd already knows about dbus-names of services and could just register them, and thus grant you all the configuration-features of its unit-files. dbus-broker already allows this, but would need direct integration into systemd for this specific example to work.

Anyway, I am not sold on a specific design for the future, so discussion is certainly welcome.

[afiestas]

I did not find any previous discussions; apologies if this has already been addressed.

Your comment is completely valid. I will open an issue in the reference implementation bug tracker and ask for feedback over there.

Your proposal is quite insightful, especially considering that D-Bus predates systemd, necessitating many features that are now redundant. However, I wonder if making systemd a hard requirement in 2024 is feasible. This, too, is a topic for discussion in the reference implementation.

Thanks!

Edit: Issue opened at dbus-freedekstop