D-Bus is a message bus, used for sending messages between applications. Conceptually, it fits somewhere in between raw sockets and CORBA in terms of complexity.

D-Bus supports broadcast messages, asynchronous messages (thus decreasing latency), authentication, and more. It is designed to be low-overhead; messages are sent using a binary protocol, not using XML. D-Bus also supports a method call mapping for its messages, but it is not required; this makes using the system quite simple.

It comes with several bindings, including GLib, Python, Qt and Java.

This package contains the D-Bus daemon and related utilities.

The client-side library can be found in the libdbus-1-3 package, as it is no longer contained in this package.