Re: GDM maintainership

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

George:

I would be happy to help out with coordinating patches and doing releases.
I probably wouldn't have much additional time to do more coding/bughunting,
though.

> As some of you might have noticed, I have not really worked much on GDM
> lately and only did very needed updates and releases.  I've also been WAAAAY
> behind on my GDM mail, with my response time being weeks if not months.  Also
> I can't remeber the last time I've looked hard at bugzilla.
>
> The problem is this: I don't have that much free time these days with my phd
> studies and teaching duties taking up most of my time.
>
> I've hoped that in the last year or so that someone would step up and start
> hacking on GDM so that I could quietly dump maintainership on that person.
> Alas, that has not happened.  So I'm asking if anyone is willing to take over
> the reins.  That is I'm asking if anyone is willing to do the work of at
> least coordinating patches and doing releases and such.
>
> Overall, GDM is not that much work if you just want to maintain it.  There
> are a few odd issues here and there, but overall it's pretty much a finished
> piece of software.  That doesn't mean that there aren't things which could
> be drastically changed, or large cool features that can't be added, just that
> overall it's not really missing much needed functionality.
>
> On the flipside, hacking on GDM causes severe brain damage due to misbehaving
> X servers and PAM idiocy.  But it's fun.  Really.  Oh yeah, it's full of
> really wonderful code that at first glance might seem really weird, but most
> of the time there is some obscure reason why it's there.  And with GDM,
> obscure can mean: "if this is not there, anyone can log in as root" and such.
> Also if GDM breaks it's not like the user can go to a menu and relaunch the
> program.  If GDM breaks, then a non-technical user will have a large useless
> brick sitting under his/her table instead of a computer.
>
> Hope I haven't scared anyone.  I'll still be around to answer questions, I
> just don't think I'll have the time to do much
> coding/bughunting/testing/releasing etc...

--

Brian