Re: [gdm-list] Separate username and password fields

[Ludwig Nussel <ludwig nussel suse de>]

Brian Cameron wrote:
> On 08/ 3/10 04:42 AM, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> > Brian Cameron wrote:
> >>> I've never liked that GDM only shows one field. I have on occasion
> >>> started to type my username in only to then notice it's coming up in
> >>> dots because the prompt to the side actually reads Password, but my
> >>> research indicates that there is no way to configure to GDM to display
> >>> separate fields for username and password. Which is a shame. Given
> >>> that having only one field can evidently cause confusion I'd like to
> >>> ask the developers to consider adding a configuration option to
> >>> display separate username and password fields. I feel that is much
> >>> more user friendly than using a single field.
> >>
> >> This usability issue is raised from time-to-time.  Unfortunately, the
> >> standard for handling authentication is PAM, and GDM also uses PAM.
> >> While PAM makes it possible to integrate novel authentication mechanisms
> >> (such as a fingerprint or SmartCard reader), its query/response protocol
> >> does not support asking multiple questions at the same time.
> >
> > Actually PAM does support multiple prompts at once. You just need a
> > module that actually asks for username and password in one
> > conversation (such as pam_unix2). Years ago I even made proof of
> > concept patch for GDM:
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gdm-list/2007-February/msg00024.html
> > IIRC fixing the graphical greeter turned out to require too much
> > effort back then so I gave up.
> 
> You can not really assume that the PAM module will ask for username
> and/or password.  A PAM module may ask for any number of multiple
> prompts.  I believe PAM can support up to 64 prompts at once, so it
> might be a bit complicated to generalize the dialog behavior so it
> works reasonably for any random PAM module and also works as you
> recommend it should for the username/password PAM module.

Any random pam module combination doesn't work anyways :-)
I don't think the generic multi prompt dialog is much more
complicated than the serialized prompting. The unlikely case of too
many prompts at one screen problem could be solved by simply adding
a scrollbar widget.

cu
Ludwig

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