ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.9, the "Design flaws" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

FLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW

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

Well, so I have strepto sore throat, or whatever that is called, in
Czech it is angina, but that sounds too much like vagina in english
and I don't have one of those.  That is last time I checked.

Anyway, about this release ... who said any software is perfect?  Well
definately not gdm.  That is why there are continual updates.  But yet
I still have not used a single longjmp so I have the moral high ground
against xdm/kdm.  If you don't know what longjmp is, you don't want to
know.  Unless you wish to practice evil ceremonies in the dark forrests
during full moon.  Then longjmp is perfect for you.  But ... that's not
really important.

So, besides general fixage we now have better setup for handling languages
(using utf8 locales by default if they exist and not listing non-existant
locales).  We also have automatic vt management at least on linux, so that
there are a few less vt specific races (that is you can safely start gdm as
any other service without worrying about gettys screwing you up).  I've also
added more comments to the default config file so that there is at least some
form of documentation.

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 2.4.0.9:
 
- Race fixing galore.  Tested many new codepaths, fixed many new races.
  Well not new.  Really old ones but still.  We're now much better
  on handling stuff being killed without us knowing, and stuff dieing
  in different orders.  May fix redhat bug #72295

- Automatic VT management.  This should fix #62997.  Basically on
  linux (only currently) we can find a free vt that is higher then
  a certain number (by default 7) and force the server to use that.
  gdm can now be safely run as service with this on.

- The locale.alias file now can have a list of locales to try for
  each language.  We also don't list locales that don't work.  This
  way by default we can use the .utf8 locales if they exist.

- DefaultLocale no longer exists, the system setup is used.  This
  was really broken.

- We no longer setup locale to a language which doesn't exist.
  We also don't unalias languages as this was broken.  Just pick
  an existing language (I doubt anyone has a setting which requires
  unaliasing anyway)

- More comments in the default config file as a bad excuse for
  documentation

- The chooser can also read <host>.png from the host image
  directory and not just <host>

- The slave now has it's own process group.  Should make things work
  better when started from init.

- Handle waiting for X to restart in a new an inventive way.

- UserAuthDir can now use the ~/ prefix so that this setting can
  now be useful.  But better left empty anyway.

- A bunch of minor fixes and cleanup.

- Translation updates (Christian Neumair)

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/2.0.1/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:  In any case, I hope nobody is taking all those 'Red Hat is destroying
KDE/GNOME' flames seriously.  Why can't we all get along?  Not to mention
that Red Hat can't destroy a free software project, just like microsoft
can't.  If people won't like their changes they won't use it.  But I fear for
those 'l33t buttwipes that are flaming Red Hat that people (people == actual
users) will probably like it anyway.  Even if those damn redhatians turn off
cool features like the titlebar.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   I killed the cat.   -- Sid Vicious