Re: Default display manager should not be gdm3
Le mercredi 22 février 2012 à 23:52 +0000, Ian Jackson a écrit :
> 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.
Actually there is a way in squeeze (since you’re talking about squeeze).
> 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.
Because of course, everything just HAS to be black and white, doesn’t
it? EVIL upstream maintainers are just opposing SANE users requesting
such a useful feature.
This feature was in squeeze and so far we didn’t reinstate it in 3.x on
upstream request. This is because they complained people used this
feature to shoot themselves in the foot and then accused gdm of being
broken. Upstream hasn’t provided the promised workaround yet, so we’ll
probably patch it again in one way or another in wheezy, but frankly
this kind of reaction makes me think of all the other legitimate bugs I
could work on.
> 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.
Just because you disagree about how things are “supposed to work” (and
really, they don’t work that much on a variety of setups that use
~/.Xauthority), you don’t have to call people crazy.
> That bug was fixed in Debian by the X maintainers adding a workaround
> to the core X session startup scripts. Madness.
This change now guarantees you can access your X servers regardless of
the state of your authority files. What you call madness, I’d call
reliability.
> We should not still be using this software.
Yes of course, we should be choosing the *default* software for display
management based on obscure features needed by a portion of developers.
(The same goes e.g. for nested displays; personally I’m missing the
feature a lot, but so far I haven’t received a single complaint.)
I’m not saying that gdm3 is perfect; I’m in a very good position to know
it is not, given the amount of patches we have to carry from upstream
and the ones that were rejected. But I also know what it is good for;
for example multi-user and a11y support are not comparable to
alternatives.
--
.''`. Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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