Re: [gdm-list] update

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Jon:

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

Yes, you've done a ton of work.  Thanks so much for getting the new
GDM into some reasonable shape.

> 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.

Unless things change a lot over the weekend, I suspect the new GDM
won't honor any old/existing GDM configuration.  As we have already
discussed, many old GDM configuration options may not make sense with
the new code, but I suspect that some would still be useful to support.

Is the plan that there will be a plugin to support old configuration
options that still make sense, or would we instead have a migration
path?  Perhaps the new GDM could detect if the user has an old GDM
configuration file and migrate useful options to the new configuration
system?

It would probably be useful to enumerate which configuration options
would still make sense with the new GDM.  I suspect we will also get
feedback from users who complain that various features are no longer
configurable.

At any rate, users who really depend on configuring GDM in special
ways should probably be warned that they will may need to do some
hacking to get their features working again.

> 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.

This looks good to me, but it seems that GDM now only supports a
face browser.  In some setups (like when you have thousands of
users over NIS), it might make sense to also be able to enter the
username by hand.  Some users might not want to show the Face
Browser at all, since some PAM configurations might not make sense
with it.  I suspect that some users will want to be able to configure
whether to use Face Browser style or not.  Or is the plan that
people who want this would need to write their own greeter rather
than configuring the existing one?

I also notice that when I enter my password that I have to click
the "Login" button.  Just hitting return doesn't cause my login
to start.

> 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.

I think using glade here is really nice.

> 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.

We probably need to be a bit careful about adding the ability to
launch programs that may have not been reviewed or audited for
appropriateness in a login program.  It is probably okay if users
want to configure login to support launching whatever they want, but
it probably needs to be configurable in some way.

> 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.

This is great.  I'm really glad we finally got the iso-codes issues
better resolved.

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

Since most users login to the same session (GNOME, KDE, CDE, etc) all
the time, and GDM saves the users default, it probably isn't used
frequently.  However, there are probably some users who switch between
sessions more frequently, who would find it annoying if it is too
difficult to get to the session choice.

Also, Failsafe login is pretty important for users to fix problems
with their login scripts when things go awry.  Probably not used that
often, but you would really notice it is gone when you need it.

> 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.

One problem with the old GDM is that it restarts the Xserver to launch
the chooser program.  So if the user had launched any accessibility
programs like orca or GOK, they have to restart them.  It would be
a bit nicer if it were possible to run the chooser in the same
session rather than starting a new one.  Not sure if this is possible,
but something worth a mention.

Brian