Joey,
I think your whole post only applies to HAL.
Fact is, DBus lets you know through a dedicated signal that you’ve been disconnected from the DBus server; at that point, you cleanup the connection and try to reconnect. Works for me.
Now, the fact that HAL (and/or libhal, it seems) provides no way of handling this situation cleanly is obviously a major bug.
I’m not a great fan of all the desktop crap that’s being promoted and hyped lately, but I am positive about DBus. DBus provides the mechanisms to handle a DBus restart properly, HAL (and pretty much everything else) doesn’t use them, blame HAL, not DBus, for this one.
As for the “DBus should never be restarted”… I have no idea why the DBus upstreams would think that, but that also wouldn’t be the first time distributions disagree with upstreams about what is good and what isn’t. The good news is, this is all free software and we can fix it without upstream’s blessing.
If somebody out there really believes that it is OK for applications to crash/exit when DBus is restarted, then I don’t have the words.
I won’t even mention the new behaviour of the DBus init script in Sid.