Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

From: Sam Spilsbury <smspillaz gmail com>

> Just a few things to note:
> - It seems to spawn about 4 or 5 server instances before it actually gets to
> your session. Is this intended?
> - LightDM doesn't appear to pull in your gtkrc or anything from
> gnome-settings-daemon (eg a11y properties and the like). Will this be
> resolved?

And now that someone mentiones a11y properties...

Sorry, I haven't test it, but just a question. Is LigthDM accessible?
Have you try something like the Smoke Test [1].

As far as I see you are proposing LightDM as a replacement. Are you
proposing to remove GDM as a GNOME module and use LightDM (in the
future)? Or your plan is have both?

GDM is generally troublesome from a11y POV [2], but getting better.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/SmokeTesting
[2] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3#gdm

> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Robert Ancell <robert ancell gmail com>wrote:
> 
>> I'm proposing LightDM [1] as a replacement for GDM.  However, due to
>> the young age of the project and the importance in the desktop stack I
>> don't think it's ready for immediate adoption.  I'd like to go through
>> the proposal process, encourage feedback, encourage developers to try
>> it during 3.0 and re-propose it for 3.2.
>>
>> Why replace GDM?
>> - There are approximately 50,000 lines of code in GDM compared to
>> about 5,000 in LightDM (they are both C+gobject based).  This makes it
>> significantly easier to work on.
>> - The GDM greeter is slow due to it loading the GNOME session, the
>> example GTK+ LightDM greeter is very lightweight (so is comparable to
>> the speed of the old GDM and newer display managers like LXDM).
>> - The GDM greeter has very limited themeing capabilities.  A
>> contributor to LightDM (PCMan) was able to quickly write a new greeter
>> that used GtkBuilder and provided comparable themeing support to the
>> old GDM.
>> - While it is technically possible to write an alternate greeter for
>> GDM, in practise it is too difficult.  LightDM has been designed from
>> the start to make writing a greeter no harder than a standard X
>> application.
>> - All X server users have pretty much the same requirements beyond the
>> login GUI.  By using LightDM the development effort of maintaining the
>> display manager can be shared between projects (GNOME, KDE, LXDE,
>> XFCE).
>>
>> Once the basics are complete, there are some innovations I'd like to build
>> on:
>> - Transitions between the greeter and the session (will work with the
>> GNOME Shell team to make these possible).
>> - Making the greeter provide authentication for the general desktop
>> (e.g. for PolicyKit).  The display manager can run X applications that
>> use different authorization, thus stopping the session applications
>> from snooping passwords.
>> - Support for new XDMCP authentication/authorization schemes
>> (XDM-AUTHORIZATION-2).
>>
>> The details:
>> Purpose:  Cross-desktop display manager
>> Target: desktop
>> Dependencies: libglib, libpam, libxdmcp, libxcb, libck-connector,
>> libxklavier, gobject-introspection, libgtk+
>> Resource Usage: Launchpad for source control and bug tracking [1],
>> tarballs in public ftp [2] (plan on moving to freedesktop.org)
>> Adoption: Not currently used by default anywhere, being proposed for Ubuntu
>> [3]
>> GNOME-ness: Display manager is cross-desktop, example GTK+ greeter is
>> fully GNOME compliant.  I would recommend this module is maintained in
>> the GNOME servers to get all the build and translation support.
>> 3.0 readiness: GTK greeter currently using GTK2, but all other code
>> uses latest GNOME standards.
>> License: GPL3
>>
>> [1] https://launchpad.net/lightdm
>> [2] http://people.ubuntu.com/~robert-ancell/lightdm/releases/
>> [3]
>> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/packageselection-desktop-n-display-manager
>> _______________________________________________
>> desktop-devel-list mailing list
>> desktop-devel-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Sam Spilsbury