ANNOUNCE: GDM 2.4.1.3, the "Snails are tasty" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

ATLEASTTHEPUFFERTHINKSSO

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

Again only one bug fixed courtesy of Matt Wilson.  I'm busy working (or
sometimes procrastinating) on my thesis, plus there was a freeze on (as if
that stopped me before), for anything much new to happen.  So this release
should be safe for consumption on non-alpha 64 bit platforms (as if so many
people have those, I don't even have an alpha nowadays, having downgraded back
to 32bits recently :)  There are also new translation updates.  All those
Mongols will get weird messages in Mongolian when gdm goes all weird and
crashes or does other evil things.  Remember that gdm runs as root so it is
allowed to do all the evilness in the world.  It is even called a daemon.
And gdm probably has more privileges on your machine then you have yourself
... However there is of course no evil code in gdm, except perhaps for the
code that gets your credit card numbers and uses them to impress other female
programs such as the X server.  I think of the X server as definitely female
since it's just so cranky and moody sometimes.  I swear my X server has PMS
at least once a week whenever I try to debug gdm.  On the other hand gdm is
of course male.  I'm not sure what political affiliation it is of, but I'm
guessing it must be conservative.  I mean it still uses plaintext .ini style
configuration files.  If anyone thinks I'm being exceptionally silly today,
they need to get smacked with a rubber chicken.

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 2.4.1.3:

- Fix redhat bug #83334 by fixing md5 code on non-alpha 64bit platforms
  (Matt Wilson)
 
- Build po directory before others.  Seems to solve an intermittent
  problem with rebuilding .pot file.
 
- Translation updates (Duarte Loreto, Fatih Demir, Gorkem, Alessio Frusciante,
  Pauli Virtanen, Lauri Nurmi, Kang Jeong-Jee, Christian Rose,
  Alessio Frusciante, Lapo Calamandrei, Christophe Merlet)

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://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:  Now that the first paragraph was so silly (or was it serious, I really
can't tell nowadays) I am going to make a serious (or is it silly?) PS.
I think my puffer wants to work in the railway industry (pruvodci).  He keeps
punching holes through the leaves (stipe listky) of the only plant he has
in the aquarium.  Now those of you that aren't Czech and don't get the
joke, this message was rather not silly.  For those of you that are Czech
and still don't get the joke, it's ok, the joke is rather stupid.

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
   cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
                       -- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)