Re: [gdm-list] Multi-seat and multi-display support design

[Halton Huo <Halton Huo Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2009-03-09 at 13:43 +0100, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 02:06:43PM +0800, Halton Huo wrote:
> > After Ray and Brian's help, I finish the design for Multi-seat and
> > multi-display support in ConsoleKit and newGDM. Please visit the
> > following link to review it.
> > 
> for my taste, you are taking way too much of the display manager out of
> the display manager. what's next? the xdmcp server? from there, it's
> only a small step to remove the display manager backend entirely. that's
> fine if you are the controlling party, but i don't like it at all. i
> prefer to see consolekit as a registry, a utmp on steroids if you like,
> with as few "active" components as reasonably possible.
Hi Ray and Jon,

Oswald is complaining this new plan. I quote the explanation from Brian
which help me know the story.

[quote]
He is complaining that the proposal is moving so much of the display
manager configuration into ConsoleKit configuration files.  He would
prefer if the configuration were kept in the display manager.  As he
says, he would prefer for ConsoleKit to just be "utmp" on steroids.
Remember that utmp is a database.  So, he would prefer for ConsoleKit
also to just be a database without "active" configuration.

Perhaps he does not like this because putting such configuration at the
ConsoleKit layer makes it harder to integrate ConsoleKit into other
display managers like KDM.  For example, if KDM wants to use ConsoleKit,
then they have to change the way that multi-displays are configured to
use the ConsoleKit way instead of whatever way they already use.

It might be good to send Ray and Jon a private email and see what they
think about Oswald's concerns.  Since the KDM maintainer does not seem
to like this approach, does this influence them to move the
configuration out of ConsoleKit and into GDM?

If so, then we would need to redesign our solution so it works more
similarly to the original gdmdynamic patch which talked directly to GDM
and not to ConsoleKit.

However, I suspect Jon and Ray will stick to the plan of wanting to
integrate these features directly into ConsoleKit.  Based on our
discussions that we have had with them so far, they have seemed very
confident about this approach.
[/quote]

Until now, we have three designs,
Option #1: ck-dynamic in ConsoleKit
   https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19333#c0 
Option #2: gdmdynamic in GDM
   https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19333#c0
Option #3: Multi-seat and multi-display   
http://wiki.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/design_for_newgdm_consolekit_multiseat_multidisplay

As Brian analysis, need we go back #2 with considering KDM? Or should we
come up a new design? 

Thanks,
Halton.