Implement autolaunch:

Last I checked, this is only an issue on non-standard environments that don't provide a long-running D-Bus daemon. Launching a daemon late in the game is likely to have unpredictable results, and may lead to multiple session buses in the same logical user session.

If it's causing a lot of difficulty, I guess the feature could be implemented using the daemon functionality now, but it's difficult to see the use case. Can you give some more details about your setup?

Note that "autolaunch:" isn't mentioned anywhere in the spec: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html

Setup and a use case is quite simple. I have a screen session (with irssi and so on) that outlives many, many desktop sessions, all of them with a new dbus session bus. So I set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS to autolaunch:, which causes all dbus applications (using original C implementation) to find the bus using files mentioned above. It's far the easiest thing to do, and works very well, except ndesk, of course, which doesn't support it.

I also know, that autolaunch isn't directly mentioned in the dbus format specification. But it is implemented in the original C code, which is used by almost every dbus library.

I have wrote a little hack (the code is really ugly), that fixes the issue for me, so I think I can happily live without autolaunch in vanilla ndesk, but it would be nice. Of course, the code isn't complete, most likely, as the only documentation I could find is AUTOMATIC LAUNCHING chapter of dbus-launch(1) manpage. It's just a hack.