Re: Face recognition in GDM ...

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 01:02:16PM +0200, José Miguel Buenaposada Biencinto wrote:
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As was pointed out, the somewhat correct blue sky way of doing things would
be PAM, with the caveat that PAM would kind of suck for this (PAM sucks in
many ways, but it's better then the alternative since there are really no
alternatives).  PAM is a question and answer kind of system which is
synchroneous in nature.  So really the best you could do is that the pam
module would say something like: "Press enter to start recognition" and then
gdm would wait for enter, then the PAM code could figure out the username and
such ...

I think way too much whackiness for a masters thesis ... I think for a
prototype it would be best to just modify gui/gdmlogin.c which is the
standard greeter.  I suspect most code will be the face recognition and this
would be the absolutely simplest way of getting it working quickly.  Later
when someone is in a masochistic mood, that person should attempt to write a
PAM module and use that code.  Really that's just an implementation detail.

So in summary, PAM is the correct place to do this except that PAM was
invented by people that hated GUIs and GUI programmers in general and wanted
to make their life as miserable as possible.  That is my current theory.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
                       -- Franz Kafka