[gdm-list] thoughts about face browser

["Ray Strode" <halfline gmail com>]

Hi guys,

So I'd like to talk a bit about the face browser and user selection
during login.  One problem some users run into with the current face
browser is that it doesn't scale well with setups that have lots of
users.

It tries to take some steps to prevent from blocking too long, but in
practice (because of network latency, etc) it doesn't provide a great
user experience.

The truth is we can really only show 10 or so users in a list before
the list becomes inconvenient to use, anyway.

What would you guys say if we designed the new face browser to
initially only show local users by default,and then show a separator
and a "Log in as another user...' button that would allow the user to
type the username?

I think it might also be useful if we made the face browser keep track
of recent logins, and filter by that. The idea being that users who
frequently do a network login on the machine would show up in the face
browser, but network logins that never happen won't show up.

thoughts?

Thinking about this a bit more, there are really a few different types
of setups that the greeter may be faced with and that we may want to
try to deal with some way or another:

- System only has root account
- System only has root account and one other account
- System has a few local accounts
- System has a few local accounts and a lot of accounts on the network.

We probably don't want to encourage root login, so maybe we should
provide a mechanism to create an account if there is only a root
account available?

If there is only one account available, maybe we should consider doing
the login in the background automatically?  If we do this, we should
probably make sure the account is locked while the login is happening
(which means we should use the factory greeter thing Jon has been
working on?)

--Ray