Re: annoucement: auto-login patch for xdm

[Michel LESPINASSE <walken@windriver.com>]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2000 at 06:07:24PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> due to a relatively popular demand on such a (mis-)feature at debian-user,
> i became interested in automatic login, too. so i just implemented it
> for xdm, kdm and wdm (wdm not tested). i thought about gdm, too, but it
> seems not to be directly based on xdm, so it would be much work.

There is something that I always asked myself about the differnet display
managers. Why do they not handle the login window as an external
application ? I would love to be able to configure the display manager so
that it calls an external application that would return a user name on
its standard output. That way the external app could easily be customized
to do whatever I want - the default choice would be to just display a
window to ask for a login and password, and then check the validity of
the password, but any other scheme could be doable, like displaying icons
for each user, or an autologin, or anything else.

Ideally the interface with this login app could even be a bit more extended,
so that the login app could also return the name of a remote display to log
on, and it could also return a set of environment variables to pass to
the Xstartup script, so this interface would allow the login app to also
work as a chooser for remote X11 sessions, or to choose between different
window managers or sessions as wdm does, or whatever. basically this means
all the functionality of wdm/gdm/whatever could be implemented in the login
app and the startup scripts.

I'm sure there is a good reason why things were not implemented this way,
but I just cant see it :)

-- 
Michel "Walken" LESPINASSE - Development Engineer at Wind River Systems
            Join the army, meet interesting people, kill them.