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



William Jon McCann wrote:
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.

It might be good idea to provide some backward compatibility with the greeters, more of a visual one, the internals could be completely changed. This probably is more to do with gdmgreeter as there are a lot of people with different themes that they want to use. Providing such compatibility would convince people to switch quicker (i.e. "hey we have new gdm - its better, it has more features and you can still use your favourite theme(s)"). What i would like to do is (please let me know what you think): * Have a gdmgreeter base class that will be used by all the greeter and will deal with all the core elements of the greeter functionality (i.e. handling the communication aspects, loading of config values, interacting with pam, e.t.c) and upon which all greeters will be built. This should provide a common code for all the greeters and make imlementation of custom greeters easier.

* Have a separate config file for each of the greeters which will contain the interface side of the configuration (i.e. Theme settings, presence of logos, menus, position of the window, etc). This info can then be removed from the main config files. This should make writing of the greeters much easier and should integrate nicely with the gdmsetup. Alternatively we could have a separate section for each of the greeters in the main config file that deals with the interface issues.

- 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.

Yup im in :). There has been some lesson learned from the bugs of current gdmsetup so i hope we can avoid some pitfalls in the new one. PolicyKit sound like a good idea. Also i would like re-design how gdmsetup looks. I was thinking of dividing the interface into two sections, one narrow column containing the icons of the "sections" and the main area which will contain corresponding tabs/other gui widgets. Atm i can think of four Sections:
1. Basic
2. Advanced
3-? Greeter related stuff - one section per greeter (the separation of the gui config info mentioned above would come in handy here)


- 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

What do we do about existing gdm in terms of fixing bugs - there are few things I'd like to tackle (mainly related to custom commands and gdmsetup) but I'm not sure if this is wise as dividing the attention between the two might cause a delay for the new gdm

Luk
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