Re: [gdm-list] Approaching GDM 2.21/2.22

[Lukasz Zalewski <lukas dcs qmul ac uk>]

William Jon McCann wrote:
> On 8/22/07, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:
> > - The existing gdmlogin and gdmgreeter programs haven't been ported to use
> >    the new D-Bus IPC mechanism.  Since Jon keeps telling us how easy the
> >    new D-Bus interfaces are to use, I think this should not be too difficult.
> >    But will probably be somewhat time-consuming.
>
> It would be much easier to just start over using the simple-greeter as
> an example.

It might be good idea to provide some backward compatibility with the 
greeters, more of a visual one, the internals could be completely 
changed. This probably is more to do with gdmgreeter as there are a lot 
of people with different themes that they want to use. Providing such 
compatibility would convince people to switch quicker (i.e. "hey we have 
new gdm - its better, it has more features and you can still use your 
favourite theme(s)"). What i would like to do is (please let me know 
what you think):
* Have a gdmgreeter base class that will be used by all the greeter and 
will deal with all the core elements of the greeter functionality (i.e. 
handling the communication aspects, loading of config values, 
interacting with pam, e.t.c) and upon which all greeters will be built. 
This should provide a common code for all the greeters and make 
imlementation of custom greeters easier.

* Have a separate config file for each of the greeters which will 
contain the interface side of the configuration (i.e. Theme settings, 
presence of logos, menus, position of the window, etc). This info can 
then be removed from the main config files. This should make writing of 
the greeters much easier and should integrate nicely with the gdmsetup.
Alternatively we could have a separate section for each of the greeters 
in the main config file that deals with the interface issues.

> > - The gdmsetup program needs to be ported to use the new D-Bus IPC
> >    mechanism, and there may be a need to revamp the way GDM deals with
> >    configuration notification to the greeters.  This code had a lot
> >    of problems in the past, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's more
> >    work to be done to fix this.
> >
> >    Also the default configuration format (but not the custom configuration
> >    format) is changing with this release, so that may also affect how
> >    gdmgreeter works.
> >
> >    I'm really counting on Lukasz Zalewski to help in this area.  He's the
> >    guy who really understands the gdmsetup program better than anyone I
> >    know.
>
> Yeah, I'm really hoping that Lukasz will be able to find the time to
> help with this.  We need his help.  It is also likely that we may have
> to make changes to the configuration system to accommodate this (for
> example we probably need to add transactions).  We should also
> investigate using PolicyKit instead of trying to run the gui as root.

Yup im in  :) . There has been some lesson learned from the bugs of 
current gdmsetup so i hope we can avoid some pitfalls in the new one. 
PolicyKit sound like a good idea. Also i would like re-design how 
gdmsetup looks. I was thinking of dividing the interface into two 
sections, one narrow column containing the icons of the "sections" and 
the main area which will contain corresponding tabs/other gui widgets. 
Atm i can think of four Sections:
1. Basic
2. Advanced
3-? Greeter related stuff - one section per greeter (the separation of 
the gui config info mentioned above would come in handy here)

It might also be a good idea to decide which config options go to which tab

> > - A fair bit of functionality is "#if 0"'ed out in the gobject-gdm
> >    branch, so re-enabling all the important ones is going to be a bit
> >    of work.
>
> Mostly this is nested xserver stuff.
>
> > - Getting ConsoleKit and the new GDM code building/running on Solaris
> >    is turning out to be a bit of work, which I've been spending time on
> >    lately.
> >
> > I'm sure that Jon also has ideas of what still needs to be done in the
> > gdm-gobject branch.  I'd appreciate some fleshing out of where the
> > progress stands so far.  This way other people, like myself, can get
> > more involved with fixing the issues.  If we work together, I think
> > we could get a new version of GDM 2.22 with D-Bus.
>
> Things are actually in pretty decent shape.  Here are some TODO items:
>
> * Nail down the relationship/interaction between ConsoleKit/HAL/GDM.
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-August/009395.html
>
> * Port gnome-panel and fast-user-switch applet to new interfaces (and
> in some cases create new interfaces) - while not strictly GDM we need
> to do this in order to understand what we should provide.
>
> * Add session migration code back in.
>
> * Add back the XDMCP chooser stuff.
>
> * Add back something for gdmflexiserver...
>
> * Make sure that our XAuth stuff is correct after all the changes (not
> confident it is)
>
> * Test all the error handling code.  For example: make sure we always
> detect a dead session.
>
> And probably some other stuff.
>
> I'll send another mail with a description of the internals in the new design.
>
> Jon

What do we do about existing gdm in terms of fixing bugs - there are few 
things I'd like to tackle (mainly related to custom commands and 
gdmsetup) but I'm not sure if this is wise as dividing the attention 
between the two might cause a delay for the new gdm

Luk
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