Re: GDM login to a JHBuild session

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Owen:

> > GDM already has too many surgical workarounds that are only used in
> > odd corner-cases, and these tend to break on occasion.  I'm not opposed
> > to adding more if someone wants to provide a patch, but if there is a
> > way to make things work without hacking GDM further, that would be
> > better, I think.
>
> The addition I'm suggesting to GDM is not "set environment variable to
> prevent launching of D-BUS" it's "set an environment variable before
> running Xsession", which seems like a very general thing. Whether I
> can convince distros to use this feature to fix the dbus-launch
> problem is between me and them :-)

What might be a better solution would be to add an extension to the
.desktop file which allows you to specify a script that gets sourced
before running the Xsession script.  Then you could set environment
variables and such that might affect how Xsession works.

Perhaps an extension, though, isn't really required.  Note that GDM
first calls /etc/X11/gdm/Xsession.  Also note that GDM sets GDMSESSION
and DESKTOP_SESSION to the session you are going to run.  The
/etc/X11/gdm/Xsession script could be enhanced to source a special
optional desktop session script like

if -f /etc/X11/gdm/$GDMSESSION.Xsession ] ; then
 . /etc/X11/gdm/$GDMSESSION.Xsession
fi

This way you could add a special script for your session that gets
sourced before dbus-launch is called in your Xsession script.  If you
want to disable dbus-launch, then you could make that work this way.
No?

I think an approach like this might be better since it would allow
people to do more general things, rather than adding a hack that just
solves one problem that is specific to D-Bus.

Brian