[gdm-list] update

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

Hi,

Been a busy week so far.  Getting ready for the 2.21.1 release.

A lot of work has gone into enhancing ConsoleKit to keep a per seat
history and provide some reporting functionality.  I hope this will
enable us to show (perhaps only) the recent/frequent logins in the
face browser.  Something like: ck-history --frequent --seat=Seat1

Large chunks of the greeter framework are falling into place.  The
greeter has become a fully fledged session.  At the moment this
session has the concept of run levels so that we can support different
modes for: graphical boot, first-time configuration, remote-sessions
(xdmcp), the login window, and shutdown.  Each of these levels can
have different in-process widgets/objects or out of process programs
(via autostart).  For now we only support autostart programs for the
login-window run level.  Examples of programs that might use this
autostart are: gnome-power-manager, and nm-applet.

We also now have a plugin based settings-daemon.  At the moment there
is only one plugin (xsettings) that sets xsettings from gconf.  But we
should probably port most of the pseudo-modules in
gnome-settings-daemon over to it too.  It could probably even replace
gnome-settings-daemon at some point.

We have a variety of widgets that are/may be used in the greeter.
Some of these include:

UserChooser: both in widget and dialog forms.  Used to display and
select users.  Data supplied by a UserManager object.  Hopefully will
have some nice ConsoleKit history integration soon.

LoginWindow: a GtkWindow that may be tweaked using Glade (probably
GtkBuilder at some point).  It is inspired by another well known login
window.  It has a click-to-cycle system information label that shows:
system name, OS release, (not yet) ip address, (not yet) network
status, and system time.  The window embeds the UserChooser widget for
user selection.  Will also host the PAM prompts on a second notebook
page.

Background: displays the background "wallpaper" for the greeter.  It
loads the settings from GConf (defaults).  This is nice in that we get
configuration for free and it just works.  We use cairo to draw this.
One thing we still need to do is to make it handle damage redraws more
efficiently.

Panel: a panel like widget that sits on the bottom edge of the screen.
 As of tonight it is disabled by default.  It contains a notification
area so that background apps can display info.  One use case for this
is gnome-power-manager.  However, the stuff that gnome-power-manager
shows strikes me as a bit inappropriate for a few reasons so I've
disabled it.  One case where this widget may be quite useful is when
logging into a remote session via XDMCP.

LanguageChooser: a tree based display/selection widget for locales.
Unfortunately, this hasn't been hooked up to the greeter yet.  It
reads the on disk locale databases and then uses iso-codes to do the
name mapping and  translation.

SessionChooser: not quite done yet.  Will allow the user to select a
session.  Hopefully this will not be seen by most people.

HostChooser: a widget that will display and allow the user to select a
host that is offering remote xdmcp logins.  The way I see this working
at the moment is after host selection we will start up a xephyr window
to the host right in the greeter.  We will show the Panel widget at
the bottom of the screen to provide: a disconnect button, an
indication that this is a remote host, and in some cases the status of
the local system.

Still a lot of work to do but we're moving forward.

Questions or comments?  Offers to help?

Thanks,
Jon