Default display manager should not be gdm3
On my netbook I'm running a pretty vanilla install of squeeze,
although my personal desktop session is very different to usual.
I wanted to add a command-line option to my X server. I spent 15 mins
trawling through docs and grepping for config options with no luck.
So I asked a search engine.
It turns out that:
* There is no way to do this without patching the gdm source code
or using dpkg-divert to wrap the X server with a shell script
* Such a feature was requested in a bug in the RH/Fedora bugzilla
in June 2008 [1]. It's also in our BTS [2]. And in the upstream
BTS multiple times with patches (September 2009, October 2010) [3].
Despite a lot of demand, it still seems that this simple and
essential feature simply wasn't on anyone's radar.
* Worse, in September 2011 one of the upstream authors seems to
poo-poo the idea [4]! It looks like they are resistant to sanity.
gdm3 also has the crazy XAUTHORITY bug [5], which was reported
to upstream [6] who inserted a completely crazy "fix" [7] showing they
totally fail to understand how all this stuff is supposed to work.
That bug was fixed in Debian by the X maintainers adding a workaround
to the core X session startup scripts. Madness.
We should not still be using this software.
I don't have much of an opinion about the rest of gnome because I
don't use it. But we should be "considering our position" as they
say.
Ian.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451562
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=651693
[3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586777
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632045
[4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gdm-list/2011-September/msg00006.html
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=586685
[6] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651431
[7] http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=199386
Reply to: