ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.6.0.3 (stable), the "The evil that is the blinking cursor" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

GFTHJKLRDVGGBPLQQWXZZVDSLKMBNV
  (this should hit a few of those spam filters looking for illegal
   letter combinations)

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

I have uncovered the evil incarnate that hides in the deepest parts of the
GDM code.  Yes.  The evil so horrible, we may have to go to war with some
country (to be picked by a reality tv show).  An evil so disgusting, so vile,
that it is worse then Stalin, Saddam, Ivan the Terrible and Britney Spears
combined.  Yes, I am talking about the antichrist, the anti-<insert your
favourite prophet name>, the cause of all that is bad (such as industrial
pollution and cheese that was left on the sone just a bit too long).  I am
talking about blinking cursors on the login screen.

Seriously what happens that they make the login screen wake up, talk to X
about 3 times a second.  This is not so bad on a local display especially if
you only have one.  But if your machine has say 20 remote terminals, then
even when idle, they wake up and do some work 3 times a second and to boot
they talk to their X server at least 3 times a second.  So now on any display
that is not :0, we disable cursor blinking after 20 seconds of inactivity.
Yes that's it.  All that buildup about something that doesn't sound all
that important.

Actually more importantly, I should brag that I passed all my qualification
exams with a `phd pass' grade which is the best grade I can get.  This is
despite getting only 62% on the topology one, but apparently I was 3rd in
class with that score.  At this point you should not that my ego is
properly inflated and we can go on with the rest of the announcement.

Other things new in this release is just a bunch of minor bug fixes and no
new features.  There's not a devel branch yet because I haven't gotten around
to making one.  Markmc and friends are apparently working on VNC support so
that you won't need all the XDMCP crack, which sounds very cool and is likely
to land sometime before or after guadec or whenever it gets sorted out.
Also it can be secure and encrypted and all that good stuff.

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 2.6.0.3:

- Fix cpu/bandwidth eating on idle displays by not blinking the cursor
  after 20 seconds of inactivity on anything other then :0, fixes #135764

- In the face greeter cut after a comma in the gecos field if there are
  at least two commas since then it's probably some login arguments and
  not the name of the user, "fixes" #142274

- Apply patch to make the language dialog at most 600 pixels so that it
  doesn't look too crappy on large displays, #142175 (Leonard Michlmayr)

- Fix last_x_failed possible infinite loop on slow machines, #141497

- Fix multihead wanker code in the *mouselistener modules, this confused
  the moronic bonobo DISPLAY logic

- Don't use certain languages on the console.  Controlled by the
  daemon/ConsoleCannotHandle config key, but that's a hack.  Oh well,
  better then displaying garbage in cjk and similar.  "fixes" #135387

- Ensure proper ~/.ICEauthority permissions to fix broken cases such
  as gnome-session vs. suid root apps that create root owned ~/.ICEauthority,
  "fixes" #137345

- We no longer use `which' command which is horribly broken on some horribly
  broken systems and use a private shell version, #133245 (Brian Cameron, me)

- Solaris fixes, #137600 (build), #133245 (chown arguments)  (Brian Cameron,
  Ivan Noris)

- Support system-config-display as X setup for FC2

- Further shell quoting paranoia in gdmsetup

- Many minor fixes

- Add some new new icons (James M. Cape)

- Translation updates (Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Alexander Shopov,
  Rostislav Raykov, Dinesh Nadarajah, Asmund Skjaeveland)

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/2.6/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

No RPM this time around BTW.  Have fun.  A spec file is included though,
so you can try:

  rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz

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

George

PS:  I think the beginning of this announcement was quite silly enough don't
you think?  Yes.  No need for more silliness.  But for those of you more
mathematically inclined I have some very funny (or sad depends on how
you look at it) silliness.  See:
  http://planetmath.org/?op=getmsg&id=4274
This is the guy who proved the most important theorem since Newton (at least
he says so, apparently he can "prove" the fundemental theorem of calculus
without using the completeness property of the real numbers, fascinating
stuff ... I mean nonsense), here arguing (you should read the whole thread),
... actually I have no clue what he's arguing.  He's a prime example of the
reason why there should be a license issued before you can get on the
internet.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Ja se vratim, a se mnou prijde zakon.
                       -- Limonadovy Joe