Re: GDM login to a JHBuild session

["Owen Taylor" <otaylor redhat com>]

On 10/2/07, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:
>
> Owen:
>
> The GDM/KDM standard for using /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop files is
> documented in the GDM documentation here:
>
>    http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/docs/2.20/configuration.html
>
> We can extend the .desktop file further if this makes it possible to
> do useful things.  However, if we are going to ask all distros to
> change the way they start dbus-launch to support DISABLE_DBUS_LAUNCH,
> then perhaps we should rethink how we start D-Bus.  Perhaps starting
> this at Xsession time isn't the right place?  Perhaps we should
> always start dbus-launch in the /usr/share/xsession/*.desktop files
> as needed?  Or perhaps it should be managed more directly by
> gnome-session itself rather than needing the login program/process
> to be aware of D-Bus?

While there are certainly other ways of doing it, having dbus-launch
be the parent process of the session, ssh-agent style, is a robust way
of doing things, and I don't see a big argument for changing that and
forcing everybody to adapt (especially since the dbus for the session
makes sense in simplified contexts where they may not be a chunk of
code like gnome-session that could substitute for dbus-launch.)

Similarly, while moving dbus-launch into the desktop file would work,
that would require adapting all session desktop files in every
distribution in a way that would break (through double dbus-launches)
if the Xsession and the session files got out of sync.

My proposal was meant to be surgical - to just address the problem of
the exceptional case where you didn't want the system D-BUS service -
rather than to try and redesign things.

- Owen