ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.1.5 (stable) and GDM 2.4.2.99 (unstable), the "TTwwoo aatt oonnccee" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

BPRLLLLLLBMPTFFFFFFFF

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

So you've been reading all these release announcement, but you didn't want to
install a new gdm because it was unstable.  Well good news for you.  There is
now a new stable release that backports some of the more important bugfixes
from the devel versions and thus doesn't suck as bad as 2.4.1.4 does.  You'll
notice the many references to RH bugzilla.  If you pay me money, I'll fix
bugs in your bugzilla too (depends on how much money of course)  :).  
2.4.1.5 is just a bugfix release and doesn't even contain all the fun
fixes from the devel versions that I thought were too destabilizing.
(Me?  Thinking some code could 'destabilize' something?  Nah!  The
real reason is that I'm way too lazy to backport more stuff)

On the devel side, there is no a no-console mode which fixes the problems
on XDMCP only servers with displaying errors in console dialogs, which
quite obviously is evil.  You can use --no-console and that will enter
this mode and ignore the [servers] section.  Or this mode is also entered
when the [servers] section is empty.

Also another fun change is that the ServAuthDir now has permissions
root.gdm, 1770.  GDM will actually try to set those permissions if it
can, so no need to do it manually on upgrade.  This makes it yet even
harder for the 'gdm' user to mess up stuff.  Basically the gdm user
can now "only" connect to new sessions (which is still bad!)

Another thing is that to annoy some people gdm will now beep when it
prompts for the username.  While this may seem just annoying, it's
actually useful for blind people apparently.  Or when you boot your
computer and aren't looking at the screen it tells you that it's up.

The bug-reporter-of-the-year award goes to Steve Chaplin.  He's filed
many nice fun bugs for fixing and even included a patch with some of
them (I didn't mention all the bug numbers below because I'm lazy)

You may have noticed that the release announcements have not been as
silly as usual.  This is because I'm suffering from becoming a responsible
individual.  Well, not really, I think I'm just growing old and boring.

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 2.4.1.5 (see further for 2.4.2.99 stuff):

- When at lower resolutions use smaller fonts (rh #83369)

- Fix text dialogs (rh #84247, rh #74911)

- Fix logout by ctrl-alt-bs to really close your session with
  pam to allow others to gain console access (rh #86481)

- PingInterval default now 1 (it's in minutes) and fix
  the comment

- Fix sleep/alarm conflict for xdmcp logins

- Fix restarts of greeters during setup sanely and fix
  hang after setup ends.

- gdmsetup won't put more then 50 entries in it's combobox
  making it not hang on large systems

- Suspend doesn't whack the main daemon

- Reset user limits after user is logging in making
  AlwaysRestart=false safe again, but leave that at true
  for now.

- Fix checking for free display numbers

- Handle X crashes vs. lock files by whacking the lockfiles

- Ignore SIGUSR1 and SIGPIPE normally which should fix those
  weird errors with X busy

- "Password: " should always be translated now

- Kill separators from all dialogs I could find.

- Cap .xsession-errors at 100 lines and convert to utf8 if not
  in utf8 to allow display.

- Other minor fixes

- Translation updates (Mohammad DAMT, Guntupalli Karunakar, 
  Arafat Medini, Abel Cheung, Ravishankar Shrivastava,
  Danilo, Segan)


Highlights of 2.4.2.99:

- Updated docs a bit

- When no local servers are defined we assume we have no console
  and don't use the console to print messages with gdmopen and
  dialog.  Also --no-console now forces this (forces ignoring
  [servers] section).  Fixes debian #194613

- Changed required permissions on ServAuthDir to be: root.gdm 1770.
  These are now enforced and GDM will try to set them if they're
  not that way already.

- Fix PostLogin to behave like PostSession with respect to the return
  value.

- Use /var/log/gdm by default as logdir rather then the ServAuthDir

- The face browsers all display at most 50 users.  This should fix
  very large systems where this may hang for a long time and more
  then 50 users in a facebrowser is useless anyway.

- Reworked the server reinit to use SIGUSR1 as it should, should
  fix some weird crashes which left X behind before.

- A lot of race hunting again.

- No more pam session_close and delete of credits if the user
  has not yet logged in.

- SIGTERM should kill things at any point properly without hanging

- Faster shutdown in case there are lots of XDMCP sessions
  open

- Fix hang on systems where maximum number of open file descriptors
  is very very high.  Use /proc/self/fd/ if available.

- Use sched_yield in places where we know the other process
  really has stuff to do, so that we speed things along.

- Remove some deprecated function use (Steve Chaplin #118361)

- Don't build with tcp wrappers if we don't build XDMCP

- Don't include programmer references in translatable strings,
  this time should really be fixed (#56654)

- Redo the user selector setup in pam.  Now completely restart
  pam when user is selected.

- In the face browsers the username is bold to separate it from
  the user info

- An X bell is sounded when the username prompt comes on.  Useful
  for the blind.

- On exit from an XDMCP display whack all the clients with windows
  to support the more broken displays.

- gdmchooser handles HUP gracefully and rereads config

- gdmthemetester improved

- Some build fixes

- Fix some C99 isms

- Many other fixes

- Translation updates (Christian Neumair, Dafydd Harries, Kostas Papadimas,
  Artur Flinta, Duarte Loreto, Christophe Merlet, Kjartan Maraas, 
  Miloslav Trmac, Gil "Dolfin" Osher, Christian Rose, Kang Jeong-Hee,
  Vincent van Adrighem, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo, Lucas 'Basurero' Vieites,
  Jordi Mallach)

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:
============

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html
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,
(or as in the immortal words of Chema: "Have sex,")

George

PS:  Damnit, why does it take so long to do two releases.  I've been fixing
up the stable branch since the morning.  And it's 3 in the afternoon now.
Given that I didn't go get lunch, I can really stop working for today in an
hour as it's already been 7 hours.  My brain is already fried though.
This means that I don't have much inclination to waste any more bandwidth
with random silliness.  (Plus I can't think of anything right now).  You
got your silliness last week or whenever that was when I did the last
release.  So, nothing to see here!  Move along!

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 (that's one long pffft)

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   We must know, we shall know.  -- David Hilbert