Re: [PATCH 1/2] Allow users to specify dbus name replacement behaviour.

[Jussi Pakkanen <jussi.pakkanen@canonical.com>]

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On 02.04.2014 21:39, Marcel Holtmann wrote:

>> In testing it is sometimes useful to be able to replace the system
>> ofono daemon instance with our own. This patch makes this possible
>> using dbus' name replacement feature. This patch has the plumbing
>> changes to make it possible to set the name replacement settings.
>> The next patch allows you to set these parameters from the command
>> line. The default behaviour does not change, i.e. the service name
>> is not replaceable and the daemon will not try to replace an
>> existing ofono instance.
>
> what is this useful for. We have been running oFono for more than 4
> years and BlueZ with D-Bus for over 10 years and never had the need
> for doing this. So I do not understand why we would support this.

This helps in an issue that comes up in system-wide automated testing.
There are some tests that we want to run different ofono instances. All 
these tests need to run in the same instance and without root 
privileges. The normal approach would be to run the tests under a 
private dbus session. However this becomes problematic when the thing we 
are testing requires other services that are only provided by the real 
system bus. Permitting name transfer allows us to replace only the ofono 
instance and do so without root privileges (installing a custom dbus 
conf file that permits name replacement during testing is straightforward).

> And gdbus/ changes must always be in a separate patch. This code is
> used by ConnMan, oFono, BlueZ etc.

If the patch is otherwise acceptable, I'll reformat and resubmit.