Re: GDM and GNOME 2.24.

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org> wrote:
> Hi Matthias,
>
> 2008/8/5 Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>:
>> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net> wrote:
>>> Hi GDM hackers,
>>>
>>> it's once again getting late in the release cycle, and GNOME 2.24 will
>>> be released in 7 weeks. I see that a first GDM 2.23.x release has been
>>> made available on July 31st to be able to test your code.
>>>
>>> Sebastien has published a list of issues and regressions at
>>> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gdm-list/2008-July/msg00028.html one week
>>> ago.
>>> The GNOME release team shares Sebastien's concerns.
>>
>> Too bad I wasn't around anymore on Sunday when this was discussed.
>> I don't see things this way...
>
> Could you please share your point of view then?

Sorry, forgot to respond to this earlier.

So, going off Sebastiens list of issues,

> * no configuration migration from the previous version (ie people who
> use gdm 2.20 and autologin should still have that activated after
> upgrade)

I am not sure that is true, actually.

The new gdm uses the same config file location and format, and the
same keys for autologin as the old gdm. I don't see offhand why the
new gdm would not just pick up the options from the old gdm, but I
have to admit that I haven't tested this. If it doesn't work, it
should be an easy fix.

> * no graphical tool to change the configuration, autologin might be
> available but how do you expect users to activate it?

This one I admit we haven't tackled yet, due to other things taking
precedence. Our opinion on this is that login screen configuration
needs to be handled in the larger context
of user management. The solution for F9 was to turn on autologin by
default where it makes the most sense (on the live cd), and explain
how to set the option by (the horror!) editing a config file:
http://live.gnome.org/GDM/2.22/Configuration

One aspect of login screen configuration that we added in F10 is the
ability to set the login screen background from the appearance capplet
(under PolicyKit control).  Unfortunately,
that patch hasn't found its way upstream yet, see
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536531 .

Another aspect of login screen configuration that is handled in this
way is power management settings, via a "Make Default" button on in
the gpm preferences.

> * no xdmcp option on the login screen

I have a really hard time seeing xdmcp support as a blocker. But if
there is a strong need for this somewhere, it shouldn't be too hard to
complete the chooser support that is present in the new gdm.

> * no graphical theme, I expect that's something users will complain
> about but that's not really a blocker

Last I looked, the new gdm didn't have a text mode login, so
'graphical' may need some definition here.  If there is a strong
desire for using the old impossibly-hard-to-get-right xml themes with
the new gdm, then someone needs to write a greeter that supports this
format.

> * would be nice to have an updated documentation

Certainly.  http://live.gnome.org/GDM/2.22/Configuration contains a
lot of the information that will be needed.

> * the lack of support for multidisplay configuration might also be an
> issue for some of the ubuntu users

This needs clarification.  If it refers to multi-display as multiple X
servers, then we probably should discuss some use cases first. If it
refers to multihead as in Xrandr,
then yes, we do want to improve the handling of that in the login
session, hopefully in time for 2.24.

The rest of the items on Sebastiens list were just Ubuntu integration
issues as far as I can tell.