RE: GDM Setup

["Maiorana, Jason" <JasonM cmsis com>]

Apologies for my first post, i did not expect sendmail to maul my
letter at the 80 char column.

JM> On the Above setup, When/Ever would such a setup be possible?
MKP>Whenever I find time to merge my hacks into the main tree.
MKP>Choosing is such a horrid hack.

I read in several places your saying that choosing is a poorly designed
feature. Probably because it was it was originally intended only for
dumb-terms not connected to a default host, and its not very integrated
into the greeter, etc? I wonder what your thoughts are as to the
deficiencies of the XDMCP choosing, (or you could point me to a link
if you have discussed/written about this before)


MKP>Similarly, I think that the real solution for remote X logins would be
MKP>to add a new security extension to X (to complement MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE,
MKP>XDM-AUTHORIZATION, SUN-DES and MIT-KERBEROS).
MKP>But thanks for your musings.  I'll keep them in mind.

I dont blame you for not wanting to implement a non-compatible protocol
in a inoptimal manner with numerous license/patent issues. BTW - i checked
into the OpenSSL stuff- it seems that it has the worst kind of BSD license
- the dreaded advertising clause - plus it is multiple-owner copyrighted.
This would not prevent you from distributing source that uses the library
but you could not ship both sources together- or ship precompiled binaries
or rpms without breaking the GPL. Plus these copyright owners are possibly
avid GPL dislikers who would be glad to turn down a request for a GPL'd
copy of the source. That alone could discourage you from even considering
it. Then add the RSA and IDEA patents in various countries, etc...

The main reason for bring the whole thing up was the general state of the
XFree project. They are so concerned with X's portability and performance,
and so dicouraged by the crypto patents/copyrights issues that a secure
X is way on the back burner. It burns me up to see all the pieces of the
tool i want (a graphical choosing login with secure remote protocol)
laying around freely- but being unable to simply combine them, an knowing
that it will be many many years before someone else will.

I just think how inpressive it would be, esp to non-unix users, if this
capability were enabled by default, and when they started their machine
it would ask them which machine they cared to use...

Time will tell, thanks for your time Martin.