Re: [gdm-list] [Fwd: gdm: still very unstable...]

[Jiri Lebl <jirka 5z com>]

Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > I think there would be an easy solution somehow restarting the preinstalled GDM preferences (like when we recently installed Ubuntu-Linux), which can be a LoginWindow button, and also a console command like 'gdm-oem' or 'gdm-firstconfig' which backup our stupid configuration and restores the first GDM working configuration
>
> Tell him to just rm -f /etc/gdm/custom.conf to restore back to factory
> defaults (and to back up the file to save his modifications).

That's a non-solution to his problem (at least the way I understood his
problem).  Or at least it does not solve the problem in a way that would be
satisfactory to me.  The problem is that a twiddly user with no clue has
broken his system.  Now a user friendly environment absolutely has to be such
that any such thing is recoverable in a user friendly way.  This is probably
something that some action similar to XKeepsCrashing must handle or some
such.  There should be something to also handle login always failing, etc...
 GDM at the time I left it did handle some of these cases, but not all.  If
GNOME and GDM is to be used on the desktop it must be completely failsafe and
completely foolproof.  Misconfiguration should always be taken as a
possibility even if the GDM setup dialog is rather minimal (you should have
seen the original GDM configurator, you could REALLY misconfigure gdm there
without even trying).

I know some distros used to disable some of my sanity checks and recovery
things, because they argued that: the user should not misconfigure his
system.  For example a distro not to be named changed XKeepsCrashing to just
show the dialog that tells the user to bugger off, that things are not
working.  I hope they have a saner setup now, but I didn't check.  I think
this is one of the reasons why Linux on the desktop is taking so long.  It is
better now than it was a few years ago, but it's not there.  Handling failure
at all levels of the system is still NOT user friendly.

Jiri