Re: GDM maintainership

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 08:13:48AM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	Yeah, GDM isn't all the scarey when you get used to it. You can be sure
> George will be very helpful if you've got questions or want advice.

Yeah, I'll still be around and answering email, at least with the frequency
that I have now.

> Also, he wrote useful documentation on how GDM works !
> 
>   http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html

Well large parts of the docs are martins original work.  And some parts of
the docs are Brian's work.  The GUADEC/dublin paper on GDM should be helpful
as well.

> 	George, one thing I always wondered about is how you build/test/debug
> GDM from CVS - I just worked from the Fedora RPM. It might be useful to
> explain the way you work on GDM.

It's fairly easy, especially if you have fedora.  The standard setup works
nice on fedora.  Firstly, if one wants to build/test/debug gdm, one should
really forget about using the gdm that comes from fedora.  Actually forget
about using gdm altogether and use startx.  I use "startx -- :7", so that the
:0, :1, ... etc displays are free for gdm debug work.  Then I just run the
"./gdm-build.sh" script which sets up prefix to install over the gdm RPM on
fedora.  Then I do "make" and "make install" as root.  Then as root, I just
run "gdm".  When I want to stop gdm, run "gdm-stop", or similarly
"gdm-restart" to restart it.  And because I don't use gdm for my session, I
can just test gdm without having to close my own X session.

Note that it's not really easily possible to install gdm somewhere else,
because you must install the pam stuff in the system location.  Further gdm
runs as root, so it's not like the rest of gnome.  Basically you have to mess
up your system a bit.  You can always force reinstall the fedora gdm rpm to
get your old gdm back.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority,
   it is time to reform.
                       -- Mark Twain