Re: [gdm-list] update

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

Hey Ray,

On 10/26/07, Ray Strode <halfline gmail com> wrote:
> > 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.
> So cairo actually has a really low quality scaling algorithm (it's
> something they want to fix, but isn't a huge priority). It might be
> better to use libbackground or whatever gnome-settings-daemon uses.
> I'd like it if ssp (Soeren Sandmann Petersen)'s slide show pack files
> worked, too, but since that's not even in upstream yet, probably best
> to wait on that.

Yeah, I actually had libbackground in svn for like a day or so.
Honestly, I can't remember exactly why I got rid of it.  My
recollection is that I found that nautilus wasn't actually using it to
draw the background but just to pull the settings from gconf.  I think
it uses EelBackground.
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/eel/trunk/eel/eel-background.c?view=markup
But I could be wrong about that.

But I agree that it would be good to all use the same mechanism if possible.

> > 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.
> Cool.  It'd be good if changing this made all the on screen things
> update they're locale.  Might be hard though.

Yeah, I've tried to keep that in mind all along.  I think it will be
hard unless we run more things out-of-process.  The LoginWindow would
be a little more difficult to run out of process and may add yet
another layer of IPC.  The trick is that you don't want to restart the
entire greeter and cause the background to flicker etc.

> >
> > SessionChooser: not quite done yet.  Will allow the user to select a
> > session.  Hopefully this will not be seen by most people.
> One thing we need to think about is how the Xsession script should fit
> in.  Right now we aren't calling it which means we don't:
>
> 1) get ssh-agent
> 2) get dbus-launch
> 3) get a login shell invoked
> 4) get /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/* run
>
> I don't know if we should use the Xsession script, or solve all those
> problems in a different way.

Exactly.  I haven't decided either so we haven't done anything yet.  I
think most of the changes to your session code so far were D-Bus IPC
related.

We should probably also go through the slave.c:session_child_run from
2.20 and make sure we have what we think we'll need in its
replacement.

> > 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.
> Sounds reasonable, although we may want to use Xdmx instead of Xephyr, not sure.

Yeah I'll have to defer to others on this distinction.

> > Still a lot of work to do but we're moving forward.
> Definitely, you did a /lot/ of work in the last few days.
>
> > Offers to help?
> Sure, anything in particular you want done that you aren't actively working on?

Absolutely.  In general, for anyone, anything on the wiki to-do list
is fair game but just ping the list and make a note on the wiki to say
that you're working on it .  I'll probably be continuing to focus on
the greeter and ConsoleKit for a bit.

If you have a chance it would be great if you could look into the
Xsession stuff.  And also maybe check out our Xauth handling.  Or
whatever you think is a top priority really.

> Right now, I'm looking into a bug where users aren't getting console
> ownership on login.  It has to do with the PAM_TTY were using.  I
> should have a patch tomorrowish.

Sounds good.

Thanks a lot Ray.

Jon