Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59 srcf ucam org>]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 02:59:06PM +0200, Robert Ancell wrote:

> - 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

The daemon side of LightDM (including the gobject bindings) is about 
10,000 lines of code, which compares to 35,000 lines in gdm. Are they 
feature comparable? Does LightDM currently implement the same user 
switching interface?

Practically speaking, in order to avoid feature regression the obvious 
way to use LightDM would be to port the existing gdm greeter to the 
LightDM backend. Who would be doing that work?

> - 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.

This is a benefit, but I'm not sure it's a huge one. The platform in 
general hasn't been designed with "Make it easy for users to write new 
UI for existing applications" as a goal.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org