dynamic welcome message

[Floris Bruynooghe <fb102 soton ac uk>]

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Hi

Years ago we used to have an xdm setup here that displayed a different
fortune message every time you saw the login screen.  Long since we
changed to gdm as display mangager, however some of us didn't wat to
part of the fortune message.  So after some arguments we sat together
and wrote a simple hack in /etc/gdm/Init/Default that parses
gdm.conf.template with sed to a gdm.conf with a new fortune message
each time.  You must admit this is an ugly hack.


So today I looked for half an hour into the source of gdm and decided
it isn't too hard to do the following:  I'd introduce 2 extra
configuration variables in gdm.conf "WelcomeIsScript" and
"RemoteWelcomeIsScript" both defaulting to "false".  Then it seems
it's not too hard to modify gui/gdmlogin.c to use the output of the
script named in the "Welcome" string as real Welcome string.

This would require a couple of additional lines in
gdm_login_parse_config() when GdmWelcome get's set and in
gdm_reread_config() for the same variable.  I'm not sure yet if it
should be done in both places or that small function should be made to
reuse the code (and save on bugs/typos).  It seems however that
code-reuse between the two is not too highly favoured...  ;-)


My question here is quite simple: would it be worth it for me to do
these modifications and create a patch?  Or would it just be rejected
coz we're the only silly buggers with a wish to do something like
this?  If it will be rejected I'll just stay with our old hack,
if there's wider interest I'm wanting to have a go at the patch.

Thanks for bearing with me
Floris

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