The kdbuswreck

The kdbuswreck

I don't think it's necessarily an ugly trick. The difference between getting a list of service names with some prefix and in getting a list of services providing some object (assuming this were even possible with D-Bus) is mostly superficial.

If efficiency is the problem, getting a list of service names for things like MPRIS could be optimized by extending the protocol slightly, e.g. by having org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames take a prefix as an argument.

Indeed, this is the purpose of the arg0namespace match rule. You register for NameOwnerChanged events with some prefix, call ListNames (or ListActivatableNames) filtering on the prefix and then you can efficiently and asynchronously keep your local list of remote names up-to-date.