Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel novell com>]

Hello,

> Why replace GDM?

What user-facing problem does this solve?

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.

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].

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/
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>