[gdm-list] Approaching GDM 2.21/2.22

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Now that we are reaching the end of the GDM 2.20 development cycle, I think we
need to coordinate towards getting the gobject-gdm branch that uses D-Bus
ready for 2.22.

There is a lot of work to do, since the existing code in the gobject-gdm branch
is missing quite a bit of functionality we need to support.  There might be
certain functionalities that get dropped in this migration, so people in the
GDM community will need to make sure they make people aware of what non-default
GDM features are really important.

William Jon McCann has done a great job of getting things working so far, but
the following areas will need some work:

- The existing gdmlogin and gdmgreeter programs haven't been ported to use
  the new D-Bus IPC mechanism.  Since Jon keeps telling us how easy the
  new D-Bus interfaces are to use, I think this should not be too difficult.
  But will probably be somewhat time-consuming.

- The gdmsetup program needs to be ported to use the new D-Bus IPC
  mechanism, and there may be a need to revamp the way GDM deals with
  configuration notification to the greeters.  This code had a lot
  of problems in the past, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's more
  work to be done to fix this.

  Also the default configuration format (but not the custom configuration
  format) is changing with this release, so that may also affect how
  gdmgreeter works.

  I'm really counting on Lukasz Zalewski to help in this area.  He's the
  guy who really understands the gdmsetup program better than anyone I
  know.

- A fair bit of functionality is "#if 0"'ed out in the gobject-gdm
  branch, so re-enabling all the important ones is going to be a bit
  of work.

- Getting ConsoleKit and the new GDM code building/running on Solaris
  is turning out to be a bit of work, which I've been spending time on
  lately.

I'm sure that Jon also has ideas of what still needs to be done in the
gdm-gobject branch.  I'd appreciate some fleshing out of where the
progress stands so far.  This way other people, like myself, can get
more involved with fixing the issues.  If we work together, I think
we could get a new version of GDM 2.22 with D-Bus.

In addition to doing all this work, we need to not neglect the 2.20
release.  I think the most serious issues that should be fixed are:

GDM daemon no longer loads all [server-foo] sections, causing problems
for gdmsetup (new breakage in 2.19)

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462613

Suppress key repeat for Return in greeter (with an almost done patch)

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462264

No prompt for "Make this session default" (with a proposed solution
in the bug report):

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453916

Any help to get all this done would be much appreciated.

Brian