Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Robert Ancell <robert ancell gmail com>]

On 13 May 2011 15:19, Miguel de Icaza <miguel novell com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>> Why replace GDM?
>
> What user-facing problem does this solve?

The main advantage I see to GNOME is to reduce the amount of GNOME
specific code that needs to be maintained.  In terms of users, the
ability to implement a greeter design is the useful aspect.

> In general, GDM code is ugly not because of what it does, but to
> prevent a wide range of security attacks that are attempted against
> login managers.
>
> Writing a login manager is not difficult, hardening one is.
>
> May I suggest that before this is considered, a security team performs
> an audit of all the security exploits that have been attempted against
> GDM, XDM and KDM and ensure that none of those can be exploited with
> the current code base.

Absolutely

> Additionally, we should compare the bug list from GDM and make sure
> that features that were implemented are not dropped, and that bugs
> that were fixed continued to be fixed here.   This just be just to
> prevent another case of CADT [1].

Also agree.

>
> Miguel
>
> [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
>
>
>>
>> - LightDM is a cross-platform solution.  Ubuntu is planning to switch
>> to it this cycle, and other distributions have expressed interest in
>> the project.  By sharing this piece of infrastructure GNOME can spend
>> more time working on important GNOME components.  LightDM is aligned
>> with freedesktop.org.
>>
>> - I am confident that the LightDM architecture is simpler than GDM.
>> Some indicators of this:
>>  - Smaller code size
>>  - Well defined interface between greeter and session
>>  - Less dependencies
>>  - Less internal interfaces
>>  Architecture can be a personal opinion, and I encourage those with
>> programming experience to look at the code and decide for themselves.
>> Note that LightDM is not lighter in features, but in architecture.
>>
>> - By having a well defined interface between the greeter and daemon,
>> it is significantly easier to develop a greeter without knowledge of
>> how display management works.  This is useful as the skillset and
>> motivations of these two sets of developers are different.
>>
>> - LightDM is a platform for future work and is investigating the use
>> of new technologies like Wayland.
>>
>> The details:
>> Purpose:  Cross-desktop display manager
>> Target: desktop
>> Dependencies: libglib, libpam, libxdmcp, libxcb, libxklavier,
>> gobject-introspection, libgtk+
>> Resource Usage: Launchpad for source control and bug tracking [1],
>> tarballs in public ftp [3] (in process of moving to freedesktop.org)
>> Adoption: Accepted for use in Ubuntu 11.10, interest from other distributions
>> 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] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-October/msg00226.html
>> [3] http://people.ubuntu.com/~robert-ancell/lightdm/releases/
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>