Re: New module proposal: LightDM

[Josselin Mouette <joss debian org>]

Le vendredi 22 octobre 2010 à 10:10 -0400, Ray Strode a écrit :
> > I wouldn’t really call it in “good shape” from a distributor’s point of
> > view. We have to include an ever-growing number of complex patches just
> > to have the features that we consider essential, and development
> > upstream is happening faster than the pace at which we can get these
> > patches merged.
> I understand this point--maintaining a load of patches can be totally
> unfun.  We discussed this before on gdm-list and I think we've made
> progress on that front since then.  If you drop by #gdm and ping me,
> we can figure out what to do about your remaining patches.

Thanks for the offer. I’ll try to do that sometime this week.

> > This situation is not new and we also carry too many
> > patches in the 2.20 branch, but it’s not getting better; the sole 2.30.2
> > → 2.30.3 upgrade included larger changes than all our patches added.
> Sure, but those changes were important bug fixes and performance
> enhancements.  I realize even if the changes were "worthwhile" it
> doesn't make maintenance for you any easier if you've complex patches
> to rebase, though.

The changes were definitely worthwhile and fixed a number of bugs. Still
some of them had side effects that I didn’t understand that broke some
patches.

> > Having had to deal again with GDM’s labyrinth of classes, I came to the
> > conclusion that Robert’s decision to restart a project from scratch was
> > the right one.
> GDM does have a lot of code, but I'm happy to explain any parts of the
> code that seem confusing.

For example I’m surprised to see so many classes that only differ of
their parent class by one or two methods. It seems to me you could do
with less lines of code by just using additional constructor parameters
or properties.

> As an example, the user switch applet is being moved to gnome-panel
> (and a comparable version already exists in the shell).  Another
> example is the accounts-dialog (which is slated to go into
> control-center pretty soon I think.  see the thread i posted about
> accounts daemon a few days ago) is used to configure things like
> "Automatic Login".

Heh, that would allow us to get rid of one or two patches :)

> This is all under the umbrella of providing a consistent, unified
> experience to the user.  The "core" of gnome shouldn't be hot
> swappable--it defines what gnome is.  I'd say the login experience is
> central to the core user experience.

It is. But as a side note, we shouldn’t forget that GNOME has to work,
for various reasons, without GDM. Even if some functionality has to be
unavailable in this case. (I’m confident there will be no problem in
this matter, since there never has been.)

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'  “If you behave this way because you are blackmailed by someone,
  `-    […] I will see what I can do for you.”  -- Jörg Schilling