Re: xfce4 startup issue

["David H. Gutteridge" <david%gutteridge.ca@localhost>]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, at 15:13:35 -0600, Robert Nestor wrote:
> As suggested by David Gutteridge, I commented out the startup of the
> dbus, hal and avahi daemons in rc.conf.  When I did this, xfce4 came
> up and appeared to be working.  So that begs the question, why the
> install of xfce4 also installs these daemons and why aren’t they
> working in 2018Q4 and current where they do work out of 2017Q4 pkgsrc.

The answer is different depending on the component. hal is no longer
maintained upstream and so is deprecated. E.g., it was removed as a
direct dependency of xfce4-thunar in 2015, and was removed as an
indirect dependency of the same (via gvfs) in mid-2018 (in the pkgsrc
2018Q2 branch). I don't know what else you have installed that may
depend on it, but you won't need it for Xfce anymore. It should not
be pulled in in a clean installation of meta-pkgs/xfce4.

avahi gets pulled in via dependencies, e.g. pulseaudio. Whether you
want to have it running or not is up to you: I don't presume to tell
anyone what to do with their machines. (Personally, I don't run it,
because I have no need for it.)

dbus is definitely still required. How and when you activate it can
vary, e.g. some users include an invocation in their .xinitrc so it
only launches if they're starting a relevant X session. If it's not
explicitly launched by any means, you should find it will start on
demand by Xfce anyway. (It does for me.) 

Dave