ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.5, the "Late announcement" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK

(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)

As some of you may have noticed, 2.4.0.5 has been on the ftp sites for a day
or two already.  Yes, you are right, it is a conspiracy.  The CIA is making
me delay these announcements in order to subdue the free world.  In my
opinion though it is those damn aliens that are making them do it, so it's
not really their fault.  Me being a resident alien, I should know something
about it.

In any case, this release comes with a whole bunch of minor, and some not
so minor fixes.  Some of them are bordering on improvements, but I classified
them all as fixes.  You wouldn't believe how many small errors you find in
any code given enough time to look at it.  The biggest improvement in this
version is the new config file reader/writer.  This is a much saner
implementation then the gnome_config one.  In fact it will keep around
comments and generally be a lot nicer about human editted files.  This makes
using both gdmsetup and a text editor for gdm configuration easier (it also
makes debugging easier for me:)

Also another thing that was bugging me and is now fixed is that the login
window yet again resizes properly when the label doesn't fit.  Yes it means
it may jump around and resize but at least it doesn't cut text.  Better gui
layout should be done for the standard greeter so that it doesn't need to
resize much at all.

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the
background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then
tells you to piss off because you forgot your password.  It does pretty much
everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much
crack.  It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer
design overall.  It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of
which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing.  The
goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to
customize or troubleshoot gdm.  It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact
extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is
still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:
=====

Highlights of 2.4.0.5:

- Applied patch from #89454 (Havoc/Owen, me) to change .gnome to .gnome2,
  to fix interaction with gnome2.  This mostly applies to the session
  chooser.  Unfortunately this resets your saved language and session
  type.

- Fix the pid checking routine on non-linux systems

- Use internal routines for writing of the config file so that things
  such as comments are now preserved, and some related problems are
  fixed.

- A whole bunch of minor fixes and cleanups, including some possible races
  and hangs

- Don't use deprecated stuff except for the occasional CList usage

- Fix io channel stuff in the greeters (actually set unbuffered and NULL
  encoding)

- Recheck for gdm running before sending any update from gdmsetup, this means
  that even if you run gdmsetup before gdm, things will still work.

- Update background and logo on the fly in the standard greeter

- Properly resize window in the standard greeter when we can't fit

- Added several more untranslated strings to the language list
  (Yanko Kaneti, me)

- Remove the failsafe 'C' locale addition and replace it with en_US,
  in case no en_* language is installed.

- Translation updates (Fatih Demir, Pablo Saratxaga, me)

Note:  GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp mkp net>, and
has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England.  She is usually
not responsive to bug reports or feature requests.  You can try to send them
to me however.

Note2:  If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites
most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf and gnomerc.  It will however
save backups with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Distributors, packagers.  Please, PLEASE use the standard Gnome script
when setting things up as gnome, or at least equivalently working scripts.  It
should never be OK to just exec gnome-session, that is considered bad form.
The script needs to read (if available) the ~/.gnomerc and otherwise read
the <sysconfdir>/gdm/gnomerc file.  This allows users and administrators to
setup custom startup for gnome.

Downloading:
============

http://download.gnome.org/GNOME/2.0.0/sources/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS.  There is a spec file included in the tarball and it may or may
not work (it should, and it did some time ago but I haven't tried it lately).

Have fun,

George

PS:  No really CIA is not run by aliens.  I was kidding.  And no they did
not make me write this just to discredit the opening paragraph.  There
are no aliens.  They have not taken me to their ship and probed me.  Or at
least, not lately.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education,
   and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a
   poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward
   after death.
                       -- Albert Einstein