ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.5.90.0 (unstable), the "SUP SUP SUP SUP SUP" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP

(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)

If anyone doesn't know, I have developed a fetish for creating new terms
to confuse anyone working on/with GDM.  I think many people wonder what the
hell is SUP and what the hell is SOP.  SUP is the socket protocol and
SOP is the fifo protocol of communicating to GDM.  I think SUP meant
something like Socket User Protocol and SOP is Slave Operating Protocol
(even though it's not even used for that anymore).  I will keep using these
names instead of the more logical "socket" and "fifo" terms because ...
because ... because I made up those terms!

In any case there are some additions to the SUP protocol with this release,
mainly the shutdown/reboot stuff is accessible through there making it
possible for a session manager to sanely do shutdown or reboot on logout
without any consolehelper thingie.  Further by actually working on making
the fast user switching stuff work a bit more, gdmflexiserver now gives you
a list of current logins, and I found out that it's not that easy to
switch virtual terminals, so you can do that through the SUP protocol as
well.  I'm mainly proud of the "mouse twiddling" feature of switching the VT.
When you use GDM to switch the VT, GDM will look if it owns that VT and if so
it will "twiddle" the mouse pointer to tickle the screensaver.  This is nice
in that for example the lock dialog appears instead of getting a blank
screen.  Yeah, it's that easy to amuse myself.  There's also the GO SOP
command along with the --wait-for-go command line argument, which is written
specifically for Seth and that nobody else will likely use anytime soon :)

Speaking of the more useless features, we now support IPv6 courtesy of Sun
and Wipro.  As if your terminal lab was running out of IPv4 address space.
In any case it's at least useful if you want to run your lab in a buzzword
compliant environment.

Plus lots of small random features/fixes.  One thing to note is that
NOW YOU NEED DEVELOPMENT GTK+.  This is kind of a departure from GDM
usually requiring more common installations even in development series
(such as 2.4.4.7 theoretically compiling on any gnome 2.x system), but
I offer the following argument in support of this recent change:
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!

So,

Have fun. (Or as Chema corrected me once, this should be "Have sex."

1.7          (jirka    03-May-01):
1.14         (chema    22-May-01): Have sex.
1.1          (jirka    14-Mar-01):
1.1          (jirka    14-Mar-01): -George

)

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the
background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then
tells you to piss off because you forgot your password.  It does pretty much
everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much
crack.  It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer
design overall.  It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of
which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing.  The
goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to
customize or troubleshoot gdm.  It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact
extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is
still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:
=====

Highlights of 2.5.90.0:

- Add accessibility setting to gdmsetup and allow setting an arbitrary
  sound for the "ready for login" sound.  (#125487)

- gdmflexiserver now lists running sessions if there are some and allow
  the users to easily switch. (#127038)

- Display last login when the user enters their name (can be turned
  off) (#128940)

- Inactive flexiservers are reaped by default after 5 minutes.

- Accessibility modules set the busy cursor for 2 secs to show that
  an action was started (#125153)

- Doubleclicking on a language in graphical greeter selects it
  (Kirk Mitchener, #123199)

- Optional info message on login (sort of like motd) (Anton Altaparmakov,
  #125219)

- New SUP (socket protocol) commands to request shutdown/reboot after
  session ends or after all users log out.  Also new SUP commands for
  querying and setting the VT on Linux.

- A --wait-for-go option that will start one X server and then wait until
  GO is sent through the fifo before going further.

- IPv6 support (Archana Shah)

- Built in sessions are out of /etc/X11/dm/Sessions and moved to
  <datadir>/gdm/BuiltInSessions

- Fix chooser commonication vs. accessibility stuff (#125064)

- Fix RetryDelay and make it default to 1 and not 3 (Leena Gunda, me, #128507)

- On AIX without PAM, password expiration is done (Vincent Berger, me, #123766)

- On crypt/shadow the double login warning was too early, now done after
  authentication as in the PAM setup.

- Clients are now forcibly whacked at session stop, should "fix" #126071

- Use GtkFileChooser in gdmsetup (Jan Arne Petersen, #128668)

- Paranoia: Check owenership of the socket before using it

- Fix xdmcp session counting (#126465)

- Warn the user when they want to set root as autologin (RH #97716)

- StandardXServer can now have arguments

- Default color is now #76848F and the PreSession script tries
  to use the default gdm color to fix #128220 

- Fix assert failure when starting Xnest (#127780)

- Indent the chooser and config toggles in the setup (#120639)

- Lots of cleanup and fixes and adding to the general paranoia in the
  code.  (me, Ray Strode, Brian Cameron)

- Translation updates (Miloslav Trmac, Andras Timar, David O'Callaghan,
  Paul Duffy, Danilo Segan, Vincent van Adrighem, Kostas Papadimas, 
  Jordi Mallach, Ole Laursen, Dmitry G. Mastrukov, Russian team,
  Sanlig Badral, Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Lucas Vieites,
  Laurent Dhima, Asmund Skjaeveland, Artur Flinta, Duarte Loreto,
  Robert Sedak, Christophe Merlet, Christian Neumair, Zygimantas Berucka)

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England.  She is usually
not responsive to bug reports or feature requests.  You can try to send them
to me however.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites
most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf.  It will however save backups
with the .orig extension first.

#ifndef GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...
#endif /* GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED */

Downloading:
============

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.5/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

I built an RPM this time around BTW.  Have fun.  A spec file is included
so you can also try:

  rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz

Have fun (or whatever else you wish to be having),

George

PS:  Have you noticed that there were a lot more features in the jump
from 2.4.1.x to 2.4.4.x, then there are from 2.4.4.x to 2.5.x.x?  This
is an apparent versioning conspiracy.  Yes, the <substitute favourite
conspiracy group here> are behind it.  In fact <substitute favourite
conspiracy group here> are behind everything in my opinion.  Just
because your not paranoid doesn't mean they won't change the version
numbers on you.  See, it's happening all over.  Think Solaris 2.6 -> 7.
GDM still can't beat that.  Perhaps next GDM will be version 8623 which
has the nice feature of being prime.

PS2: Which reminds me of something that happened to me recently.  You know
you are in a university math department building when you have an elevator
conversation with random people you don't know about the primeness of
different floors and the merits of the 6th floor being perfect (note that
AFAIK, the number theorists, and other fields as well, seem to be dense on
the 7th floor rather then the 6th)

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   I wanna be sedated.  -- Ramones