Re: GDM branched for 2.18

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Corey/Luca:

> > There were quite a few patches submitted to GDM that came too late to
> > make it into 2.18, so right now I'm working to get those upstream.
>
> I know in Boston we talked about changing some of the XML to make it
> easier to specify a background and foreground, to allow things like
> gdm-until-desktop with a consistent background. For that matter,
> exploring the gdm-until-desktop stuff Ryan worked on would be cool, as
> I know Ryan is too busy to finish it.
>
> The notes from the hallway bof in Boston were summarized here:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gdm-list/2006-October/msg00006.html

I implemented one feature we discussed at the BOF (item 4 in your
link above), so that the language and session choices can be
selected from a drop down list.  This is in GDM 2.16.2 and later.

Items #1-2 are really different parts of the same idea.  That the
transition between login and the session should be more cool.  The
proposed patch should, I think, be considered a prototype.  However,
just making GDM display the theme longer isn't significantly more
inspired than the existing transition.  Really there should
probably be some handshaking, probably via D-Bus, so that the
login and session programs can agree how long the login screen
should display, and how the transition is managed.  To support
animated transitions like the Cube transition in MacOS, it
might be nice if GDM displayed its GUI until the session were
ready and then some animation transitioned could be rendered.
Making this work in a way that doesn't break GDM for non-GNOME
sessions is also important.

Item #5 suggests that we only need a magnifier solution to get
rid of gdmlogin and only support gdmgreeter.  Not quite true,
there are several other bugs against accessibility in gdmgreeter.
It doesn't work with GOK, there are no high/low contrast themes
(or way to switch to them), keyboard navigation is broken and text
widgets don't talk to text-to-speech since they aren't real GTK+
widgets.  There are bugs for all these issues and they are slowly
getting resolved.  Actually quite a few issues have been fixed and a11y
works better in gdmgreeter than it used to.  It is slow going, though.
gdmlogin is still much more functional for a11y users, especially
those who need a magnifier, GOK or high/low contrast themes.

I don't know anything about pessulus, so I can't speak much about
how it should integrate with GDM.   Though if people are interested
in working on improving GDM in any way, let me know and I'll be
happy to help.

Brian