ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.2.97 (unstable), the "I'm being paid!" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKIKIKIKIEEEK

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

[For a stable version use version 2.4.1.4]

Yay, I'm actually being paid.  Well I was a Red Hat intern during the last
release, but now I've actually received my first paycheck, meaning that 
they weren't just joking about me working for them.

About this release (I mean I suppose you're reading this because you want to
know about the new GDM release and not about my financial situation, right?).
So this release is mostly bugfixes and security related fixes.  Many bugs
with the XDMCP support have been fixed or improved.  Security is another
area that got a lot of work.  No security holes have been patched, but
we are a lot more security consious.  For example someone who compromises
the gdm account can do less damage now.  Furthermore all failsafe dialogs
now run as the gdm user (even the error one).  Also things don't link to
as many libraries as they used to, for example the daemon links to 26 libs
now instead of 46 (as reported by ldd).

Also with this release we revert back to defaulting AlwaysRestartServer to
false.  The issue that this was trying to work around has been fixed, and it
is really nicer to the X server to reset it instead of restarting it.  I know
that in the past I held an opposite opinion, but the number of people with
X bugs that get triggered by X restarts is quite high apparently.  And it
looks nicer this way (no flicker back to vt1) and likely faster too.

A known issues is that the graphical greeter may sometimes crash due to a bug
in libart.  I for some reason started getting these crashes and fixed libart,
but I'm not sure when a new version of that is coming out with that fixed.
Since this bug would have existed for you before, it is unlikely that you
will experience it.  In any case, the daemon will nowdays try gdmlogin for
you if gdmgreeter is crashing.

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 2.4.2.97:

- HIGify almost all the alert boxes.

- Fix install of the sessions setup by creating the /etc/X11/dm
  dir fixes #116836

- Fix DNS lookup stuff in XDMCP for places without DNS.  Also cache
  last result of DNS lookup to cut down traffic during session setup.

- daemon, gdmgreeter, gdmlogin and gdmchooser don't link against
  libgnome and friends (gdmgreeter still uses canvas).  This
  reduces number of libs linked by daemon from 46 to 26, for
  gdmgreeter this goes from 56 to 32 and for gdmlogin this goes
  from 52 to 22, and gdmchooser is down to 27

- If a greeter crashes within 10 seconds of display start, try
  running a different greeter (and telling the user that)

- Fix the chooser so that it actually chooses the host that
  you clicked on and not some random one.  This also changes
  the chooser to use GtkTreeView

- Fix #97774 by resetting the rlimits back after we fork the
  user session.  Also make AlwaysRestartServer default to false
  again since it was a workaround for this bug.

- Checking for free display numbers was only taking into account
  servers listening on tcp.

- The .desktop files include correct Terminal and StartupNotify
  entries (Jordi Mallach)

- Fallback for home is now ServAuthDir for gdm processes
  instead of / and for shell we use /bin/sh consistently
  (rather then /bin/bash)

- The full error dialog is now run as the gdm user for security
  (no more gtk code run as root)  Also uses GtkTextView,
  looks nicer and converts encoding correctly.

- Be very careful when opening files just about everywhere,
  so this prevents some possible damange someone could do if
  they do manage to get the gdm user privs.

- If X server crashes or doesn't otherwise whack its lockfile,
  help it along, should fix #114003 and redhat #90014

- No translatable message contains unneccessary markup now
  (fixes #101794 and #101795)

- gdmsetup .desktop file is now in the SystemSetup category
  and so goes into System Setup in the menu (#116977)

- The bits that parse X output now understand v4 XFree86 output
  correctly

- gdmopen now sets up TERM to "linux" on linux to make sure
  that fonts come out all ok

- Use ve-config (from vicious-extensions) everywhere in the daemon

- Fix RH #84247 by checking for gettext binary before using it

- The standard themes now don't include the translated labels
  since they weren't used anyway and this improves load times
  and memory usage.

- Updated the theme document a bit, and the dtd is now in the
  tarball in gui/greeter/

- Random other minor fixes

- Translation updates (Danilo Segan, Serbian team, Metin Amiroff,
  Christian Rose, Kjartan Maraas, Artur Flinta, Vincent van Adrighem,
  Valek Filippov, Laurent Dhima, Christophe Merlet, Mohammad DAMT,
  Dafydd Harries, Kang Jeong-Hee, Simos Xenitellis, Miloslav Trmac,
  Artur Flinta)

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.  It will however save backups
with the .orig extension first.

Note3:  Note3 has been depracated ...

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

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.4/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/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:  Since I've now got a @redhat.com addy, and access to the intranet, I now
know about all the conspiracies going on inside Red Hat ... oh wait ... no,
there are no conspiracies ... yeah ... that's it.  I should be careful ...
if I say too much I'm likely to wake up next to a dead horse head or some
such ... I've now been tainted and can never be trusted again.  Actually
come to think of it, I've already been tainted at Eazel, but we all know
where all those evil Eazel (Eavel Plans) plans went, so they weren't
particularly dangerous to the world-as-you-know-it.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
                       -- Monty Python