Re: [gdm-list] a few gdm changes

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Ray:

> So last week I wanted to hook up the session chooser.  I started
> looking into the code and noticed that it had a lot of duplication
> with the user chooser.  I guess it's pretty inevitable since the tree
> view requires a lot of boiler plate to get up and running.  Anyway, I
> tried to abstract out most of the bits that are in common into a
> "chooser" widget which is just a view and model together that supports
> the shrineking behavior found in the user-chooser.  It also adds
> mnemonics, which are pretty important for ally I think.

I really appreciate you helping with this.  Did you also add Failsafe
login support.  Note it would be nice to add a feature to be able to
configure which terminal program is used.  The old GDM always uses
xterm, which is not accessible.  It would be nice if GDM could be
configured to use gnome-terminal instead.  KDE users would probably
want to stick to xterm or something else.

> I also added some hoaky animations to it.  It's not really a general
> purpose widget, just something that's useful in the context of the gdm
> greeter.

Note that if you are using any custom widgets, that this probably means
extra work will need to be done to make them work with a11y.  It's best
to avoid using custom widgets unless we plan to invest the extra effort
to make them a11y.  One of the advantages of using the stock widgets is
that they "just work" with a11y (for the most part).  I'm not sure if
you are using custom widgets, but I wanted to highlight that issue.
Also we need to ensure that the interface is completely navigable via
the keyboard.

> In the name of hoaky animations, I made the login window slide to fit
> its contents as the contents change.   Not sure if the animations are
> a good idea but they look pretty nice on my laptop.  if they're
> something we want to keep then we should fix them  up to run in
> constant time instead of "go until done".
>
> When adding the session-chooser to glade file I noticed we didn't use
> glade's "Custom Widget" feature, so I made a change to do that
> instead.
>
> Anyway, now that I've got the session chooser added, I'm not sure I
> really like it.  Most of the time the user just doesn't care.  Maybe
> it shouldn't be in typical view?  Another question, is where should we
> put language and keyboard choosers?  I guess since they all have to do
> with the current use they should be grouped some how.  Does anyone
> have any opinions? We could do keyboard like gnome-screensaver does
> (as a little icon next to the input entry), although I'm not sure it's
> very discoverable there.

I like the approach of using the menu like the old gdmlogin does.  We
could also provide quick keybindings so that people can launch them
quickly if they don't want to navigate the menus all the time.  Buttons
are also nice and a little easier to use than menus, perhaps a
configurable Toolbar where the user can pick which buttons are available
in the toolbar?

Brian