Re: [gdm-list] gdmdynamic questions

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Yan:

> What's the current production and development code?

GDM 2.21+ is a complete rewrite and has a completely different codebase.
The eventual goal is that the new GDM rewrite will replace the old GDM.

However, the current GDM does not yet support several features, some of
which I believe you depend upon.  I believe you said you require
multi-display support (managing more than one monitor with different
logins), which is an example of a feature not yet implemented in the new
GDM rewrite.

In short, both GDM 2.20 and the 2.24 are both being supported.  Most
new development work is going on in 2.24.  However, some work is still
going on in the older GDM 2.20 to address regressions, fix bugs, and to
add features that users push for.

> Should I be working in 2.24 or 2.20?

It depends on the distro, and which versions of the distro you intend
to use/support.  Different distros are migrating to the new version of
GDM at different times.

In the long run, it probably makes sense to enhance GDM 2.24 the most.
However, to meet your short term needs, hacking the older GDM may be
more straightforward since a fair bit of work would be required to
get simple multi-display support working.

Note if you wanted to use the latest GDM, you could probably use
gdmdynamic to make it manage multiple displays, though this code is
still very much experimental and only available via the patch in
the following bug report:

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536355

Note, the new GDM requires D-Bus, ConsoleKit and has close integration
with the latest versions of gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-session, etc.
Therefore, it would likely be work to get the latest GDM rewrite to work
well on distros with older versions of GNOME.  That could also affect
your decision of which version to use.

--

Brian