Re: [gdm-list] Approaching GDM 2.21/2.22

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

On 8/22/07, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:
> - 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.

It would be much easier to just start over using the simple-greeter as
an example.

> - 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.

Yeah, I'm really hoping that Lukasz will be able to find the time to
help with this.  We need his help.  It is also likely that we may have
to make changes to the configuration system to accommodate this (for
example we probably need to add transactions).  We should also
investigate using PolicyKit instead of trying to run the gui as root.

> - 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.

Mostly this is nested xserver stuff.

> - 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.

Things are actually in pretty decent shape.  Here are some TODO items:

* Nail down the relationship/interaction between ConsoleKit/HAL/GDM.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-August/009395.html

* Port gnome-panel and fast-user-switch applet to new interfaces (and
in some cases create new interfaces) - while not strictly GDM we need
to do this in order to understand what we should provide.

* Add session migration code back in.

* Add back the XDMCP chooser stuff.

* Add back something for gdmflexiserver...

* Make sure that our XAuth stuff is correct after all the changes (not
confident it is)

* Test all the error handling code.  For example: make sure we always
detect a dead session.

And probably some other stuff.

I'll send another mail with a description of the internals in the new design.

Jon