Re: windowmangaer selection & sound problem

[Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi@kde.org>]

> Idealy there needs to be a proper way for kdm to know about other
> wm's.... gdm does this by using /etc/gdm/Sessions/* ...a wm would
> drop it's session file in there and gdm would automatically pick it
> up...  
>
to make this work in a sensible way, it needs to be part of the
debian policy. my idea (partly stolen from suse):
every windowmanager would add (and remove upon uninstall) itself
to the file /etc/X11/windowmanagers (or, if you like it more, put
a symlink to the executable in a windowmanagers directory). then
it would call update-windowmanagers, which would be a script provided
by the installed display manager (the dm's would have to conflict
with each other, but they already do it functionally anyway). for
kdm, this script could do something like that:

WMS=$(sed 's:/.*/::' < /etc/X11/windowmanagers | tr '\n' ',') #the file variant
#WMS=$(ls /etc/X11/windowmanagers | tr '\n' ',') #the directory variant
cd /etc/kde2 && sed "s/^SessionTypes=.*\$/SessionTypes=default,${WMS}failsave/" <kdmrc >kdmrc.new && mv kdmrc.new kdmrc

this does not require any additional magic in kdm and allows 
distribution- and display-manager- specific solutions.

the file variant has the advantage, that one can spcify a
non-alphabetical order without doing additional voodoo. the directory
variant is simpler to edit, as one only needs to create and delete
files, but obviously the user has no control about the order, in which
the managers apprear in the login dialog - hmm ... who cares?


btw, gdm directly branches into the different session files. if you
look at these files, you'll notice, that they have a lot of code
duplication. i think, it's better to have a common Xsession and let it
finally execute the window manager/desktop environment (like xdm/kdm do).


best regards

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