Woes with X Display Managers

[Achim Bohnet <ach@mpe.mpg.de>]

Hi,

there are currently several problems and nuisances when xdm, gdm and kdm
packages are installed on a system


Major problems are (also reported in BTS)

	o xdm, gdm and kdm what to manage :0 by default.
	o session script of gdm (Debian, Gnome) are not found be
           kdm (kde) and vice versa

and minor stuff but  maybe worth fixing in the long term.

	o each dm as it's own convention where to put files
	o Files like Xaccess and Xservers prestart/poststop scripts
	  are not shared and many have to be done again when
	  one switches the display manager


For first two points solutions that come to my mind are:

	a) make ?dm conflict with the other ?dms
	   (easy, but then gdms, kdms session scripts should move
           into their own packages or the corresponding *base package)
	   
	b) introduce a display-manager package.  It's
	   init.d script would would start one of
	   the available display managers.

I like b) and one solution would be a /etc/X11/display-manager direcotory
that contains the real startup scripts and /etc/X11/display-manager.opts
(by default the first script in display-managers is used).  The opts file
could also be used to start different display managers at different
runlevel (If've read in the BTS that people are doing thinks like that :)

I offer to code the display-manager stuff.  But maybe others have better
idea how to solve the problem so I first ask.


Achim

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