Re: UI change of "Languge" selection in gdm2

[Bob Doolittle <Robert Doolittle Sun COM>]

George wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 07:00:36PM -0800, Jerry Wall wrote:
>  
>
> > I do grant the denial of service issue can be real, getting a greeter
> > in Russian, Arabic or some other language can be quite confusing
> > especially if you do not have the greeter menu locations memorized.
> > The best defence that we have come up with is to reap idle sessions
> > that have been disconnected.
> >    
>
> And if someone makes a nice patch for that I'll be very happy to apply this.
> Same goes for a sane language-on-the-fly setting patch, that is, one that
> doesn't add any more crack then we've already got.
>  
We're getting off-topic, but there's no need to do this in the display
manager.  Sun Ray Server Software does this with dtlogin.  The notion
of "disconnected" is separated from the display manager.  Think
of a "connectivity manager" layer which sits under the "X
session/display manager" layer, which is responsible for determining
when a new desktop appliance is connected, and therefore needs to
reconfigure the display manager and create a new display/X session for
use on that appliance.  Also, think of an existing X session where a
user walks away from the desktop appliance, and disconnects the
session, later reconnecting it at possibly a different appliance.

With dtlogin, we went to some lengths to expose information about when
it was offering a greeter.  Then, when we notice that a "greeter
session" has been disconnected for some period of time, we tell the
display manager to kill it off and reclaim the resources.  We'll need
to do the same with gdm2.

For dtlogin, we did this by starting up a "reaper" during Xsetup
(which dtlogin runs immediately prior to running the greeter).  The reaper
starts a timer any time the session is disconnected, and stops the
timer if it is reconnected.  If the timer expires while the session is
disconnected, it reconfigures the display manager to reap the session.  When
the greeter completes (i.e. user logs in), dtlogin runs the Xstartup script,
at while point we "reap the reaper".  I'm not saying we should do this
identically for gdm2, but this is how it's done today for dtlogin.

Regards,
 Bob