ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.0.1, the "George is lazy!!!" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

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

Yes it is true.  If you release something the day you leave for a month
long holiday with no internet access.  It is very likely to be very broken.
Well at least there were no security issues :)  In any case I suppose
it's more because of the fact that people actually started using gdm
and so they found more bugs.

In any case.  What's new in this release is mainly bug fixes.  It is
a stable release patchlevel so you'd expect that.  One minor feature
did creap in because of other fixes though, and that's the ability
to run unhandled X servers.  What that means is that gdm can now
be used to run X terminals that connect to some other host, see the
default config file for an example.

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 2.4.0.1:

2.4.0.1 stuff:

- Fix killing other processes including the session when greeter settings
  were touched, fixes #84717

- Don't run the gdmwm when there is a windowmanager present, fixes #86620

- Fix some Solaris compilation issues, fixes #86679

- Don't clear env for chooser, greeter and setup and run gdm itself from
  a script, fixes #87387

- Properly center windows

- Fix gdmchooser to actually work

- Install missing files from the happygnome theme, fixes #86264
  (Frederic Crozat)

- Fix non-xdmcp compile, fixes #85681, and properly test for
  xdmcp, fixes #86607 (Mike Castle, me)

- Fix #85785 by linking with -lcrypt as the first thing

- Fix wiping the pid file by mistake on config file errors

- On linux do better checking for stale /var/run/gdm.pid files,
  by checking /proc (Jim Bray, me)

- Many random fixes all around

- If we can't write the user authentication in the home directory
  use the fallback file (say due to out of disk space errors)

- Add a 'handled' flag for servers (see default gdm.conf for some
  notes on how to use it) that makes it possible to run unhandled
  X servers (such as X terminals).

- Fix finding the parent process (Oswald Buddenhagen)

- Translation updates (Yanko Kaneti, Jesus Bravo Alvarez,
  Ole Laursen, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, Christophe Merlet,
  Vincent van Adrighem, Hasbullah Bin Pit, Pablo Saratxaga,
  Tőivo Leedjärv, Changwoo Ryu, Duarte Loreto, Andrew V. Samoilov,
  Dmitry G. Mastrukov, Peteris Krisjanis, Borislav Aleksandrov)

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:  As opposed to the last announcement, this time the opening was not very
silly at all.  However, my imagination is at a zero level right now and I
can't think of anything that would be silly enough to redeem myself.  This
means that you will have to live without any sort of silliness from me,
at least until the next gdm announcement.  Sorry.


-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun
   than you can with a kind word alone.
                       -- Al Capone