Included configuration file "org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist" contains deprecated fields, requires user intervention on old OSX

Submitted by Zac Bentley

Assigned to D-Bus Maintainers

There is a plist file included with the dbus distro to make it place nicely with OSX's launchd. That file is visible at https://cgit.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/tree/bus/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist.in

It has two issues on recent (post 10.4/10.5) versions of the OSX operating system:

It uses the deprecated "ServiceIPC" key. This either does nothing (deceptive) or generates lots of warnings in the OSX syslog equivalent complaining about the use of a deprecated field. See the following link for admittedly sketchy info on the deprecation, though the warnings definitely do occur on versions after 10.4: http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabble.com/About-the-ServiceIPC-key-td189335.html
It has a manually-commented section disabling the "OnDemand" key, with user instructions to uncomment that section on OSX 10.4.

These require user intervention to suppress errors on new OSX versions or to get things working on old versions.

Two fixes should be made:

The plist file should be templated by the build system, and the "ServiceIPC" key should be removed on OSX versions greater than 10.4.
The "OnDemand" section should only be present on OSX versions <= 10.4; it should be ommitted in subsequent versions. If users want to hand-configure OnDemand enabling or disabling for other reasons, they are free to do so.

Version: git master